WRITING: Gravity (Chapter 10)

[phantastus]

Title: Gravity
Chapter: 10 (Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale)
Author: phantastus
Fandom: Silent Hill
Rating: R (see the Disclaimers/Warnings section for more info)
Genre: Horror
Main Characters: Angela Orosco, James Sunderland, Laura
Summary: Despite all roadblocks, dead ends and breakdowns, the journey continues. Even with monsters at their heels.
Notes:
Well, folks. This is it. Not the end of the story, but the end of part one, at least. With the completion of this chapter, Gravity has reached a length of 202,045 words (200k!! Holy shit!) and over 600 pages in printed book format. As much as that can be attributed towards me being an insufferable windbag who can't edit myself worth a damn, that's still pretty wild!

That said, given not only the significance of this milestone but also recent events, there's a couple of things I want to talk about. Namely, the subject matter of the story as it relates to the current state of affairs we're all dealing with. I'll get right to it— this year has been awful for everyone, and especially in the past couple of months (you all know what I'm talking about), it's looking very bleak. A lot of us, myself included, have a tendency to turn to fiction when the real world gets too scary and stressful, and that's so important. I can't count the ways that being able to fall back on the worlds and characters I love (including Silent Hill) has literally saved my life.

But this part of the story is not hopeful. It is not comforting.

It's a sad coincidence that the arrival of THIS chapter (which has been in more or less a state of completion since last year, just in serious need of polishing) happens to coincide with one of the most politically terrifying moments in the history of my country, right when all of us need a little extra hope. But that's how it goes.

In fact, as disappointing as it may sound, I'm going to go ahead and say that if you're coming to read this in a state of active stress and vulnerability, you should wait until you're feeling better to come back to it— and I promise, things will get better. Both for us, and the Gravity gang. This has always been a story about people battling trauma and mental illness, and there will always be times when that battle seems unwinnable. But that doesn't mean that it's over. Hang in there. I love you.

Depressing subject matter aside, this has been waiting in the wings for years, and I'm so excited to finally share it with everyone. Thank you all so much for your patience and support. I hope it was worth the wait.

Disclaimers/Warnings: In keeping with the source material, this fanfic depicts situations and events that may be considered violent or cruel. If you are triggered by anything in the Silent Hill series, this story may not be for you. This chapter deals with VERY DISTURBING CONCEPTS including but not limited to:
-descriptions of anxiety, nightmares
-self-harm, discussion of suicide
-intense PTSD episodes, trauma-induced flashbacks and hallucinations
-pedophilia and incest (father-daughter grooming and physical/sexual abuse)
-general focus on living and coping with mental illness
-there's a flashback to the Brookhaven cockroach room, so bugphobes beware
-Angela continues to misandry it up— she can't be stopped, she's too powerful.
-a Very Special Guest Appearance!

Please read at your own risk.
Additional Disclaimer: Again, in light of What's Currently Going On, something occurred to me that might warrant a statement— nobody's gotten this impression so far, but just in case, I wanted to mention it. In writing Angela (and by extension, her family) as Latinx, I had no intent whatsoever to evoke certain negative stereotypes about Mexican people, specifically Mexican immigrants, that have recently been normalized by the president-elect. Unfortunately, I can't change the facts of canon, and it's a little too late in the story (not to mention gross and whitewash-y) to go back and make Angela white in order to avoid her traumatic backstory being problematic by association, but I will say this: the character of Thomas Orosco, at least when it comes to the treatment of his daughter, has far more in common with Donald Trump himself than any person of Mexican heritage that I've ever met or known.
I hope that I have handled the subject matter sensitively enough to avoid making it seem like Angela's trauma and abuse are in any way connected to her race, and of course, if anyone sees places where I can improve, I welcome the help!

Recommended Listening:
-Abraham's Song (Bibio Remix)
-Little Baby (tw)
-Woodsman Wolf
-Ye Olde Hope
-The Demon God
-Everything Burns
-Civilian



Chapter 10: Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale



The setting sun first became a blurry, hazy spot of light behind a wall of dust-grey clouds that coated the sky like gauze. It seemed to ripple from time to time, as though the world was underwater. Below, along the horizon and in direct contradiction, lay a blazing strip of fiery orange, sizzling at the edge of a treeline like the flames James had once watched consume the old Lakeview stairwell.

It had been three days since they had picked up Angela from the side of the road, and they still hadn't made it to their destination.

But for once, it hadn't been because of traffic or bizarre brushes with the law.

For the duration of James's travels with Laura thus far, there hadn't been that many detours. The girl's creative trail-blazing aside, James was an unimaginative driver and the novelty of her new life on the road was apparently enough to keep Laura happy most of the time, despite her frequent claims of boredom. Motel to motel was how they had been living for weeks, and there had been little to no deviation.

But their unexpected addition had breathed new life into the routine and James had found, quite without his intention, the car frequently leaving its route and stopping itself in all kinds of unexpected places.

Like a zoo.

They hadn't gone in, but there had been peacocks strutting around the lot and Laura had chased them until she found a shiny emerald feather to bring back to Angela.

And a big, grassy park. The uncooperative weather hardly seemed to matter to the girls, who hadn't come back to the car until the sky had started to darken behind its cloud cover. Laura had regaled them for the rest of the night with tellings and retellings of how she'd found an abandoned hot dog bun with an earwig in it. Despite claims of revulsion, she seemed to relish sharing the gory details.

And a Goodwill. Angela's filthy clothing hadn't been doing her any favors and James had waited patiently outside while she reluctantly ducked inside to find some replacements. Laura had gone in with her (accompanied by a handful of money from James) and emerged with an oversized blue sweater covered in pink butterflies.

They ate less extravagantly, and Angela still insisted on sleeping in a separate hotel room, of course, but after the first day or so, she had started to accept the Tupperware bowls of macaroni that they offered her.

James had found his fingers tapping out a rhythm on the steering wheel as they drove, having finally gotten back on the main track. The sky was growing darker now and the lights of the town they'd just left were fading out behind the treeline.

Seated in the back, Angela had fallen silent from the bright, friendly chatter that had, against all odds, overtaken the three of them as they'd made their way down the winding roads in dusty sunset light. James glanced at her in the mirror from time to time, noticing that she had curled back in on herself, knees to her chest and shoulder pressed to the door as she stared out at the passing fenceposts and shrubs.

It wasn't a surprising occurrence— at least not to James. At this point, it was almost a relief to know that he wasn't the only one who did it.

Because at this point, they had become the quiet, thoughtful sort of broodings rather than the initial, tension-brimming ones accompanied by hostile eyes in the mirror that had made him want to pull the car over, get out, and walk in tight, nervous circles for awhile until he felt less like yanking at his face and hollering incoherently.

For that reason, the quiets between conversation had become almost soothing.

So with spirits only slightly dampened by the sickly skies, James asked, "D'either of you wanna listen to some music?"

"Put it on the channel with the cowboy music!" Laura demanded instantly. Unlike her older companions, she had been getting increasingly impatient with the frequent silences during which neither her new friend nor James did anything interesting. She had been kicking her legs idly, making the greasy paper bag in her lap rustle. It contained the last of the french fries he'd gotten her at the park earlier and she'd almost thrown them away, but James had told her to hang onto them. They might not be too appetizing tomorrow, but they'd still be perfectly edible. And that meant breakfast for one of them. Or lunch. Or dinner.

"Country?" he promptly translated, reaching for the volume dial.

His wariness of the radio had persisted for some time since they had set out, but as the weeks passed and it failed to dissolve into squealing static or stuttering phantom voices, it had slowly returned to being a comfortable companion during long stretches of road.

"Yeah!"

The girl began to hum happily as the familiar strains of guitar plucked their way into the air. She had never been the sort of succumb to glumness and she had become more lively than ever since Angela had joined them. It was good for her, James reckoned... having a friend. As much as he was relatively certain that she no longer considered him an enemy, he was under no illusions. Laura did not consider James Sunderland her friend.

As fiddle and drums joined the guitar, James checked the map idly out of the corner of his eye from where it lay on the dashboard.

They were still an hour or so away— it would be dark by the time they arrived. Darker than James preferred when he was driving, to be honest. He didn't like to drive in the night, not these days. The late summer sunsets allowed him a generous window of time with which to locate their roost for the night while the skies were still lavender and the moon just a pale outline floating above the trees like a half-manifested specter. But tonight, he was anxious to get back on track. While Angela didn't seem resentful that her mark on the map had been unintentionally but consistently nudged backwards on their list of priorities, he'd made her an offer and he needed to stay true to it.

So they drove on as inky darkness seeped into the clouds, and as the accompanying headlights before and behind them began to disappear down various turn-offs and driveways one by one. The roads had grown narrower and begun to wind— they'd already been out in the country, but now they were heading even further. And even in the toasty bubble of security that they seemed to have blown up around themselves, the passing scenery— those hilly fields and dark masses of trees— sometimes made his heart do a sickly flutter.

So he focused his thoughts on the road ahead of them and the soft hotel beds at the end of it as they drove past farmhouses and the occasional pen containing scattered, muddy animals getting some last-minute grazing in before returning to the comfort of their hay-filled stalls for the night.

"So... Angela," he said. "Why'd you pick this town?"

"What?" She looked away from the window and gave him a blank, startled look as though he'd jolted her out of deep contemplation.

"You know... the one you circled on the map. Where we're going."

"Oh... um..."

She shifted in her seat. Unlike her two companions, she actually wore the seatbelt. Part of him had wondered why at first, after the things he'd learned about her in Silent Hill. But then he'd felt bad for it and pushed it from his mind.

"I... I guess it was sort of random..."

"Heh, yeah, that's how it goes," James said with a half-grin, taking one arm off of the steering wheel. "Most of the time we just... go."

"But you're not going... anywhere?" Angela asked, brow furrowing. "I thought you were just trying to be nice when you let me pick..."

"Nope!" Laura chirped.

"... Why?"

"Well... I guess it just doesn't really matter," James said, leaning back. "... Anywhere is fine. Just as long as it's away."

"... Oh," said Angela softly, and he knew she understood.

"Anyway... we'll make it tonight, but it's gonna be pretty late by the time we get there. That okay?"

She shrugged in response, looking back to the window with one slender but weathered hand propping up her chin.

"I don't really care," she said quietly, a hint of that horrendous weariness re-entering her voice. "I mean... it'd be nice if we got there eventually..."

"Well, we'll definitely do that, so don't worry," James said confidently. "We're in the right county already, pretty sure."

"I believe you," came the murmur from the backseat, and then there was silence again.

The fields began to disappear, replaced by trees as the terrain grew increasingly uphill. The mingled lights of farmhouses and other buildings had winked out in the distance behind them quite some time ago. Towns out here were little more than out-of-place patches of urban sprawl that disappeared into forest and farmland the moment you turned the wrong corner.

"... I'm bored," declared Laura after some time, inevitably. No matter how good she was at entertaining herself (and she was good at it), there was only so much she could do once the light left the landscape. This was yet another reason why James preferred to get his driving over and done with before the sun had fully set.

When he didn't answer straight away, she stood up in her seat, leaned forward, and began to prod his shoulder urgently.

"I'm bored!" she repeated, the unspoken demand of 'Do something about it!' tacked onto the end.

"You could play 'I Spy'," he replied a little wearily.

"No, I can't! 'Cuz I can't see anything!"

She was right. It was certainly a dilemma.

But in addition to being good at entertaining herself, she was also good at solving problems.

So without much further ado, the little light in the ceiling of the car was flicked on.

"... Laura, we can't have that on while we drive," James told her, but he didn't trust himself to take his hands off the wheel to reach up and turn it off himself, not on a windy road like this. "It's distracting to other drivers!"

"There aren't any other drivers," Laura huffed stubbornly, plonking back down. "I wanna draw."

James huffed out a quiet sigh, but it was around that point that the illumination made him aware of a much bigger, much more important problem. Because the light that the little bulb was offering was a great deal dimmer than it should be.

"... Uh oh..."

Laura ignored him, already determinedly coloring in the o's in the food stand's logo on the bag she had. Angela, though, looked over in concern.

"... What?" she asked apprehensively.

"We're... we're almost out of gas," James mumbled, frowning as he reached out to tap at the glass, under which quivered a needle that was hovering dangerously close to empty. He could recall glancing at it earlier, but he didn't remember it being that low...

"... Wh... how?" Angela's voice broke its usual quiet murmur in her astonishment. "Didn't we just stop at a station yesterday? You filled the tank. I remember."

"Yeah, the needle went all the way up! I saw it," Laura joined in, not sounding worried so much as excited at the prospect of something happening.

James barely heard them.

His mind had rushed with uncanny speed back to his recurring dream about the endless highway and the gas needle creeping ever closer to rock bottom, and he found himself almost paralyzed in his seat, pulse thrumming under his chin as the girls' voices faded into a dimming, muffled chorus.

It wasn't until something jostled his seat that he snapped back to reality, looking up to find Angela's reflection staring out from the mirror at him in alarm as she waited for a response.

"... I... it's okay. There's gotta be a station around here somewhere," James said hastily. Because there had to be, right? Surely there was some turnoff they could take that would lead to some patch of civilization tucked between the trees. Even Silent Hill had gas stations, and Silent Hill was about as out-of-the-way as you could get without plunging into total wilderness.

He pulled around a tight bend, eyes rapidly glancing left and right, looking for a sign— any sign— that his nightmare wasn't about to come to fruition.

There had once been a time when injecting any emotion into his voice at all had been an exhausting battle. But now he found himself fighting just to keep it from sounding hysterical. "Just... just keep an eye out... W-we'll pull off this road at the first sign of one..."

"... I haven't seen any lights in awhile," Angela noted unsurely, her attention returning to the window. "Are you... sure?"

"I... I think I saw a station on the map at some point," James said falteringly when no lights appeared at any point along the new stretch of road. "... Laura, could you... could you look?"

There was a compliant rustle of paper, but Laura's obedience was likely nothing more than a means to an end. Namely, the opportunity to smugly respond, "NOPE!" when perusal of the map turned up no likely prospects.

Then again, James wasn't entirely sure Laura knew how to read maps. His brain decided to cling to that in the process of hoping they were still coming up on some turn that would yield what they needed.

All the same, he was already calculating whether or not they had enough to justify turning around and retracing their steps back to where they would definitely find a gas station. But... that needle was precariously low. Impossibly low. They probably didn't.

"... Laura?" he asked weakly.

"What?" came the reply, from where she had returned to her coloring activities.

"I... need you to turn out that light. Um. Please."

"What?!" she said again, the same word somehow encompassing a lot more anger than before. "I'm coloring!"

"... We really need to, Laura," Angela said softly after a moment, reaching up to turn it off herself— although she watched Laura the whole time, as though worried she might be overstepping her bounds. Fortunately, and perhaps only because it was Angela who was doing it and not James, the girl just frowned deeply and slammed down her marker.

"Thanks," James mumbled to no one in particular, trying to ignore the dread pooling in his stomach like liquid lead. "And if you guys could... could keep an eye out for any signs that advertise rest stops? ... This map is pretty old, they might've... might've opened stuff in the interim..."

Angela let out a quiet snort to show what she thought of that possibility.

James chose to ignore it and reached out to grab the map, futilely hoping to see something that Laura hadn't, even though his hope of seeing anything by nothing but the headlight beams was pathetic at best.

And, as if on cue, said beams began to flicker.

"No! No, no, no. Damn it!" James found himself cursing emphatically as the yellow dashes on the road ahead of them seemed to blink on and off like warning lights. He usually did his best to avoid using adult language in front of Laura, but teaching her how to shock grandmas was barely a blip on the Things James Didn't Want to Do radar compared to getting stranded on some dark country road in the middle of the night.

"Son of a...!"

He smacked the steering wheel as if the car were a drowsy person he needed to try and keep awake. It didn't do a thing.

In fact, as if trying to get in on the action, the radio began to fuzz in and out, sending an extra burst of alarm off in his brain. Static had saved his life many times, but at the cost of at least a couple years off of his total lifespan, judging by the way his heart began wild tapdances in his chest every time he heard a gush of white noise. He dropped the map entirely in favor of fumbling with the knobs until the sound disappeared.

The engine began to chug erratically.

"—wait, what's happening?!" exclaimed Laura, apparently having only tuned in long enough to tell James things he didn't want to know, not bothering to concern herself further with Grownup Car Talk until their troubles became impossible to ignore.

Before the words even finished leaving her mouth, the headlights went out entirely and plunged the road into darkness.

In a response that felt more rational than he was feeling, James pulled to the side of the road immediately. He'd driven this car long enough that he knew it wasn't particularly good at staying coordinated during its last dying moments when it was running out of fuel. There was a list a mile long of things he didn't need to be happening right now, but the very last one was definitely crashing the poor thing with three people inside it.

Gravel crunched and a few loud snaps rang out as the car rolled straight over unseen bushes and underbrush— then puttered to a halt.

For a moment, there was no sound but the three of them breathing raggedly in the darkness.

"... We... we probably won't be getting there tonight," James confessed feebly.


~*~


A small flashlight beam wavered wildly out the window at him as he came back around to the driver's side door, arms full of blankets and a much larger light; a cylindrical electric bulb topped with a handle, lantern-style. He'd handed the little one that he'd carried latched to his chest in Silent Hill to Laura for her to hang onto while he got the emergency kit out of the trunk.

Like the first-aid kit in the glove compartment, the emergency kit was something that was there solely due to Mary's urging in a bygone period of James's life, and he'd never been more grateful for it than he was now.

She had probably never in her wildest dreams thought that the first occasion in which the need arose would be her husband driving out in the middle of nowhere with a runaway eight-year-old and a skittish hitch-hiker. At this point, he wasn't sure if it would have amused or frightened her.

He caught a glimpse of the sky overhead— black and starless as the inside of a closet— as he slipped back into the car, and a shudder made its way through him. The night sky almost always did now, just as it had on that last night in his old house, when he'd turned to the lights for comfort.

It was just too reminiscent of that black hell he'd spent countless hours in, blindly navigating the streets in search of doors that opened in darkness, dodging abominations that staggered up to him out of the shadows, attracted by the puny light on his chest. Even if those streets had been lined with brick buildings and parked cars rather than the dark, prickly spires that these pines became after sunset, the difference helped little. These woods still felt like walls, and ironically he found himself feeling more claustrophobic outside the car than within it.

Shutting the door firmly behind him, he turned once more to the two girls.

Laura was holding the little light under her chin, painting her face with with shadows. They turned it into a ghoulish mockery fit to tell stories with, ideally from the shelter of a warm tent packed with puffy sleeping bags. This was a far cry from a camping trip, though, and she looked frightened.

"What're we gonna do?" she asked querulously, her eyes gleaming with unshed tears in the flashlight's beam.

Far from her lack of concern earlier, now the magnitude of the situation had apparently hit her. In all the time he'd known her, Laura had rarely displayed fear in front of him that didn't come in the form of going silent and stony-eyed. This wide-eyed terror was something he'd only seen caused by the surefire threat of wasps and drunken, bearded men. And, well, now this.

"Well... we've got a couple options," James said, doing his level best to stay calm and collected. To call on that dead, wooden feeling that had started to grow through his chest like roots when he had finally started to become numb to the horrors of the Otherworld. It wasn't really a good feeling... but it was more conducive to keeping a cool head than feeling mad with fear.

"What happened?" Angela interrupted, voice hushed.

"Well," James started again, rubbing the back of his neck. "I poked around a bit, and... there's a hole in the gas tank. I mean— not the gas tank gas tank, it's a hole in that little rubber grommet where the fuel g— anyway, it's leaking. And since we've been on the road awhile, it went... way lower than it ever should've gone... I... I don't know how I didn't notice it before... but that's what must have happened, we sprung a leak."

The discovery had struck a note of fear into him for more reasons than just their imminent predicament or how his breathing had grown shallow and heart pounded when he had to get down on the ground and peer under the car in the dark, forgetting for a moment that he was looking for dripping gasoline and not a twitching body waiting to dart out at him while he was on his knees and unable to get away fast enough. Something like this cost money to fix. With a paycheck, it was barely anything, but on the road, a twenty-buck replacement was a couple meals at least.

He pushed the oncoming cloud of interlocked worries to the back of his head for the moment— there was nothing they could do about any of it when they were stranded in the middle of the night.

"... That's why I think it'd be best if we spent the night in here. And... and then once it's light out, we can go look for a phone or something that we can call a tow truck with. Or... or something like that. Once we can see where we're going."

It sounded reasonable enough to him. But Laura still looked like she was about to cry.

"I d-duh-don't wanna stay here! I wanna go f-find a house," she begged, pulling her knees to her chest. It was a strange sight, to be honest. He had watched her scamper in and out of dark, foreboding doorways and skip merrily down streets sagging with decay and water damage without a care in the world.

But then, it had all looked different to her.

"Laura, if we go out, we could... we could get lost, or hurt, or..." He swallowed a little at the thought. "... Run into wild animals..."

Not that animals of all things would be anything compared to what he'd already faced. No raccoon or coyote, no matter how rabid or mange-ridden, could ever live up to deformed women staggering out of the darkness in bloody clothing, dragging steel pipes behind them with which to smash bones and bludgeon skulls. And while he bore no animosity towards animals in general, he was fairly certain that he could dispatch one without the same paralyzing hesitation that frequently gripped him when faced with the frighteningly human elements of some of the monsters.

But that didn't mean he wanted to wander a woodland full of unfriendly wildlife in the middle of the night. Not when it was so dark that any of them could easily take a wrong step and snap their ankles on a root or incline.

Helplessly, he turned to Angela in hopes that she'd be his voice of reason.

"Angela, don't... don't you think we should stay here? Just till morning?"

Unlike Laura, the young woman had remained sitting in shadow after her initial question, silent as the grave he'd first met her standing in front of. And silent she stayed, at least for a few seconds.

"I... I don't..."

"See?" James turned back to Laura, assuming that this would be followed up with 'think that wandering here at night is a good idea', only to hear:

"... want to stay here."

Oh, no.

"You don't?" repeated James dumbly, listening to the desolate whoosh of his comfortable, low-risk plan falling away like a box of loose papers dumped out of the bottom of a plane.

Too late, he noticed that Angela was quaking slightly in the darkness.

Her voice was a feather-soft mumble that nonetheless held an urgency he had never heard from her before.

"I don't— I— I can't stay in this car," she breathed, voice fluttering. "W— ... I have to go, I c-can't..."

The tremor in her voice was more alarming than Laura's predictable, childish fear.

Surely... surely it wasn't because she still thought he'd try something? He couldn't even touch her from the driver's seat, and even if he was the sort to TRY, like he could even think of doing something like that in front of Laura!

"Angela?" he asked slowly. "Are you... are you okay?"

Laura didn't say anything, but she had turned to Angela as well, eyes wide. The older girl's fear was apparently not helping her own barely-under-control panic. Angela flinched under the expectant twin gazes, wringing her hands.

"I— I-I— ... yes, I'm fine, I just— I can't, I c-can't stay here in this car, we have to— we have to go somewhere else. P-please..."

"Angela... where are we supposed to go?" James asked weakly, raking his fingers through his hair. "There's... I have no idea where we are, or where anything is, or..."

"I d-don't— I don't KNOW, I just have to— I c-can't stay in here," Angela said miserably, and to James's horror, she reached for the door. "I need to...!"

What she needed to do, he never found out, because before he or Laura could so much as make a sound, she had slipped out into the darkness.

"ANGELA!" Hissing a curse under his breath, James popped the lock on his own door and hurried out after her. "ANGELA!"

"JAMES!" Laura cried after him. "DON'T GO I DON'T WANNA BE 'LONE!!"

It was a claim she'd almost surely go back on once she had the daylight to back her up, but for now there was nothing but blind, hysterical terror in her voice. An amped-up version of the fear a child feels when they're being put to bed and left behind in a room full of dark corners and cracked-open closet doors.

"I'll be RIGHT BACK!" he shot over his shoulder. "Stay in the car, it's gonna be okay!"

He didn't shut the door behind him. There was no time to. He just rushed after the shadow that was Angela.

She wasn't running— just walking fast, her tennis shoes slapping wetly on the damp road. It had been raining for part of the day. She was hugging herself tightly, head hung and shoulders hunched. Her breath was coming out in sharp, pouty puffs, and she let out a yelp as she stumbled on her shoelaces but kept going, doggedly.

"Angela!"

James jogged to catch up, boots skidding on the wet leaves under his feet. It was so dark he could barely see where he was stepping. The road was just a paler shade of black stretching in front of him, and the trees loomed above like hooded specters. His heart began to pound harder.

"Angela!"

Fully aware that doing so was the last thing either of them wanted, James finally reached out to try and catch her elbow as he drew in range.

"Angela, please!"

Predictably, she whirled around, arm flying out of his grip. "DON'T TOUCH ME!" she screamed.

"I know! I know, I'm sorry! I'm sorry," he blurted, backing up and lifting his hands in the air. But she had stopped power-walking away from him and that was what was important. "But Angela, we gotta— we gotta stick together, okay? Please!"

She threw her arms out and started to turn in place, moving in tight, agitated circles like a trapped tiger. Her hair flapped as she shook her head wildly, sniffing hard and fighting back what had to be tears.

"I can't stay in that car. I won't. I WON'T."

"Okay! We won't stay in the car!" James relented at last. When it came right down to it, he knew he'd rather take his chances in the woods with all two of his companions in tow than stay in the car with a hysterical Laura while leaving Angela to wander off to god knew where. There was no way he could do that. "We'll— we'll think of something, all right? Just... don't leave. It's too dark. We don't know what's— it's too dark."

And the doors that only wake in darkness should be yawning and rubbing the crust from their eyes right about now...

"Just... come back to the car with me— to get Laura, a-and the other flashlight," he pleaded. She stopped pacing, but glared at him with wet, fear-filled eyes. James lifted his hands, palms towards the sky. "I... I shouldn't have left you behind in Silent Hill, Angela. I did, and I'm sorry. ...But I'm not gonna leave you behind now."

She stared a moment longer... then took a shuddering breath and nodded.

It took some coaxing, but eventually he was able to get her to trail after him long enough to walk back to the Oldsmobile. Unlike the road ahead, the car's location was perfectly visible thanks to the waving light flickering out through the windows as Laura cast it about. She had remained in the backseat, scooting firmly into the middle as though afraid that either door might have a hand outside of it, ready to snatch her if she got any closer.

Angela stood and hugged herself unhappily as James leaned into the vehicle.

"Laura... come on, we're gonna walk down the road a bit... see if we can find any houses."

"No! I wanna stay here!" she exclaimed, shaking her head furiously, apparently having made an abrupt about-face in the five minutes or so that the two of them were gone. It was hard to blame her, after having presumably watched his back disappear into shadows down the road. But that didn't make his job any easier...

"So do I, but we have to go. Come on."

"No! It's scary!"

She yanked her feet up onto the seat with her, pressing her back into the upholstery and clutching the flashlight to her chest like she feared he might try and take it away from her.

"I wanna stay here!"

"Well, we can't," he finally said, trying his best not to snap (he already knew where that path would lead) and not entirely succeeding. "We have to go. You don't wanna upset Angela, do you?"

Laura's breath hitched. The light flickered out the window and across Angela's features. She had turned away slightly, embarrassed that James had brought her name into it. But with her back turned, it was all the more obvious that her shoulders were quaking.

Looking back to James, Laura's bottom lip quivered for a few seconds before she mumbled a wobbly "... No..."

Holding back a sigh of relief, James reached out to open the door and Laura scooted out of the car, scrubbing her eyes with the back of one hand and snuffling. He locked the door behind her carefully once she was out, reminding himself to check, double-check, and triple-check that they were all shut. This was not a time he could afford to carelessly leave a door open like he so often seemed to now.

He'd just have to hope that it would be safe parked here until dawn. If they left and came back to it only to find it had been towed in their absence, then they'd really be stuck.

Looking over his shoulder down the road, James hoped against hope that he'd see some headlights approaching right this moment— anything to spare them from the surely-difficult night ahead— but none came.

With one last sigh, he patted the window of the car and turned to the girls, who were standing behind him. Laura was still holding the flashlight like a lifeline, sending its beam straight up into the spiky clouds of evergreen branches above. Her teeth were chattering despite the temperate summer night.

Angela was holding one of the duffel bags over one arm and an empty gas can in the other. Finding a station this far into the middle of nowhere seemed foolishly optimistic, but they'd feel even stupider if they actually did stumble across one and didn't have any way of actually taking the fuel back to the car.

"Okay... so, here's what were gonna do..." James said, after taking a deep breath. "We're gonna walk down the road and look for a house. Somewhere with a phone that we can use. If we're lucky, we can get a tow truck out here."

"We're not lookin' for a hotel?" Laura sniffled.

"I don't think there are any hotels out here, Laura," Angela murmured, somewhat more composed, although she still had that gargoyle-hunch in her shoulders, and her ankles were bent out as though trying to prevent her knees from knocking together too much. James wondered if the dark stirred those flutterings of instinctive terror in her like it did for him.

He couldn't see her eyes when she looked up to him, but where her tone was serious but soft when she'd been talking to Laura, it took on an edge now.

"James... it's... it's been awhile since we saw... any lights, at all. Are you certain we'll be able to find...?"

James had been doing his best to stay level-headed, but he could feel a surge of his old temper, the one that had once made him snippy and sullen with the terminally-ill love of his life, rising.

"Well, I'm not the one who couldn't stand to stay in the car, so if you've got any better ideas, let me know," he said sourly, before he could stop himself. Regret slipped in as soon as the words slipped out and he slapped a hand to his forehead, heaving a sigh. "... Look, I'm sorry. Let's just... get going, okay?"

Angela had gone still and silent when he snapped, but she slowly nodded.

Then she held a hand out to Laura.

"Come on, Laura."

The little girl sniffed again, swiping a hand noisily across her nose and then taking Angela's offered one with it. Angela didn't seem to mind.


Progress was slow for the first half-hour.

It seemed like every five minutes that Laura would get a pebble in her shoe or hear something shuffling in the forest. Knowing that there weren't any monsters— or that there shouldn't be any monsters, rather— did nothing for James. Every time Laura whimpered about something following behind them, his heart began to race and he found himself automatically reaching to his pocket where the handgun had once lain, waiting to be cocked and fired upon the shadowy denizens of that misty town. And every time he himself heard a twig snap or the night cry of some animal, he regretted having thrown away his weapons back there on the overlook. How could he have thought that was a good idea, after everything he'd been through?

The night made him feel helpless and naked. The weapons of the body were good against nothing but other human beings, and it wasn't human beings he feared.

Fists and flat, useless human teeth were nothing more than nuisances to a monster.

Eventually, Laura whimpered that she didn't want to walk anymore at all. James felt he was on the verge of tearing his hair out, but to his surprise, Angela wordlessly bent down to let the girl climb onto her back, then straightened up and continued on, her slight frame standing tall despite the weight. James nodded wearily to her to show his appreciation as they continued to slog up the road with no end in sight.

James found himself trying not to look at the trees on either side of them— to just keep his eyes on the road. It activated his imagination a little bit less when all his eyes had to stare at was his light glimmering off the pavement.

One foot ahead of the other. Step by step. No monsters here, no sir, it's just us tired, miserable road trippers without wheels...

"James."

Angela's voice, along with a slight tug at his sleeve, brought him to a halt. When he looked over his shoulder questioningly, she nodded towards the side of the road.

"Look."

To their right was a wide dirt path that stretched off the main street and twisted downwards through the trees. Flicking the light towards it, James turned around to stand dubiously in its mouth. The beam didn't stretch very far, only glittering off a few trunks' worth of shiny sap dribbles before fading into impenetrable darkness. It could be a long driveway. Or it could just lead to more nowhere.

Beside him, Angela shifted her weight to support Laura better. The little girl had seemingly dozed off, although whether she was asleep or just burying her face in the back of Angela's turtleneck and trying to tune everything out as much as possible was debatable.

"It looks like it could lead to a neighborhood. Do you think there'd be a house somewhere down there?" Angela asked quietly.

"... I don't know," he admitted. Dragging a hand across his chin tiredly, he looked over to her, brows peaked. "Are you tired? ... I could, um... take her, if you need a break..."

"I'd rather you didn't," came Angela's somewhat-short reply, but when he hung his head apologetically, she hastily added, "Sorry. I know you're not... it's just. You know."

"Yeah," he said, knowing there wasn't anything else he needed to say. He jerked his head at the road. "T-there's no guarantee we'll find anything if we go down there. It could just lead to... I dunno, a lumberyard or something. Or wind up being a nature trail. We... we might have better luck if we keep going on the main road."

"Yes, but... look." She leaned down as far as Laura's weight would allow her without sending the both of them toppling over. "See all those grooves? They're tire tracks... s-so people must drive on this road, and often, too! Maybe we will find something."

James took one last look up the main road, reluctantly. "... Well..."

"... If it gets too nature traily, we can always come back," Angela offered. She sounded out of breath, and a pang of guilt hit him in the chest. The paved road was mostly uphill. The dirt one trailed downward. It was easier terrain for someone lugging a child on their back.

He gave in.

His boots crunched on the dirt and scrubble as he started down the new road, and he could hear Angela's footsteps behind him as she followed, carefully picking her way over the grooves to avoid tripping. Her light— she had taken possession of the flashlight he'd given to Laura, once the girl had gone piggy-back— flickered ahead of him, something he was grateful for.

The path was bleak— even bleaker than the paved one, where at least the roadside rails would occasionally shimmer in the light of the beam and make him briefly hopeful for the sight of headlights around the bend. The forest closed in overhead like a set of fingers folding over a captured bug, and all he could think of was the winding trail he'd walked down from the Overlook, down into that little town by the lake what seemed like so long ago.

It had been daylight then, but the misty wood had felt largely the same... and the entire time, he'd been able to hear things around them. Rustles and breathing, like something had been following him unseen through the underbrush.

A cold perspiration had started to form on his skin, and he wasn't sure if it was from the dampness or his growing awareness of the thud-thudding of his own heart.

The bizarre episode from the hotel room had crept back into his mind's eye, as well as all the horrible visions that had been plaguing him through his sleeping and waking hours alike over the past few months. Even more than the possibility of actual physical danger, the worry that his fears would lapse into another one of those here and now chilled him beyond belief.

What would he do if a staggering, twitching figure loomed up out of the darkness ahead of them? Panic? Scream for the girls to run and try to take it down himself? What if it turned out to be nothing, like in the hotel?

What if he turned around only to find his companions staring at him in hollow silence, the cold realization dawning on them that what little he had left of his mind was quickly gurgling away down the drain?

"See anything yet?" Angela piped up from behind him.

"Not yet," he said over his shoulder. "Just a lot of trees... and some potholes... I didn't even think you could get potholes in a dirt roa— WHOA!"

As though Satan himself had overheard him and decided to throw a little more irony into their night, his foot promptly went straight into one of said potholes and sent him staggering forward, his light waving wildly as he flailed for balance.

"Y— James! Are... are you..."

She didn't finish. Just trailed off, as though in surprise at herself for asking after his wellbeing. It surprised him a little too, so they could be even on that front.

Once he'd righted himself and made sure that his ankle hadn't turned into a right angle, he let out a soft exhale and a shaky "Y-yeah... better start watching my step... I'll crack my skull open if I'm not careful..."

"Well, we wouldn't want that," Angela said, and if he listened hard, he thought he could detect a faint sense of humor in there. Or maybe she was perfectly serious. It was hard to tell, with her. "You're the only one who knows how to drive."

"Yeah, good to know my place in this world," James mumbled, not entirely bitterly, starting to pick his way along again.

Suddenly, a hideous shriek rent the still night air— a hoarse, raspy sound that sounded like the vocal equivalent of a set of nails raked down a chalkboard. A scream like a dying old woman.

James froze like a rabbit in the headlights of a minivan, eyes popping like ping-pong balls.

"Stop! SH!" he hissed frantically, throwing his arms out to stop Angela from moving forward. "What was that??"

His mind was already spinning with possibilities— a new type of monster? One with a broken, hanging jaw and withered, bony hands? One with eyes that shone like light bulbs and a spine that stuck out like a root from a riverbank? One that hung from a metal frame and spat out fluttering moths as it thrashed in its death throes?— when he heard a second sound. A quiet, breathy noise coming from directly behind him.

It was Angela, and this time she was definitely laughing.

"Oh, James... haven't you ever heard an owl before?"

James stood there dumbly for a moment, trying to reconcile the two things in his head: the deep hoo-hooing cartoon owls he'd watched on his dusty TV set as a child and the awful tortured-grandma scream he'd just heard.

"What? That wasn't an owl... was it?"

The cry sounded again, and Angela pointed upwards at the trees. "Yes, it is. I used to hear them all the time. I'm from a lumber town, my house was on the edge of a forest. ... You must be from the city."

He wasn't sure Ashfield counted as a city, but it was true... there hadn't exactly been any big forests in the area.

"I grew up in Ashfield," he mumbled, starting to walk again, although he couldn't help but start shining the flashlight into the trees in search of the elusive avian creature that was apparently responsible for those noises.

"Ashfield?" Angela said thoughtfully. "I don't think I've heard of it..."

"It's in Massachusetts," he said, stepping over a particularly deep rut that must have formed in the spring from runnels of melting snow. "About a six-hour drive from... um... you know..."

"Oh... that explains it... the last time I was outside of Maine besides... well, now was when I was very small..."

"Yeah... I didn't see much of the rest of the world, either."

"But you could have, couldn't you? If you'd wanted."

James had to think about that for a moment.

"... Yeah, I guess I could have..."

He was about to elaborate on that, when Angela softly interrupted.

"Look."

She was staring up into the branches. He followed her eyes with his flashlight and spotted it— a big tawny bird with a pale face and dark, round eyes. It blinked owlishly— no pun intended— in the light. For a moment they just stared up at it, and it back at them.

Then James let out a chuff of a laugh.

"Wow... you were right. I guess it was an owl..."

"And I guess you are a city boy," Angela remarked quietly behind him. "Maybe that's why you always looked so lost back there in that town..."

It was something that, a few days ago, would probably have been full of venom when it came out of her mouth. But to his surprise... there wasn't any.

She continued down the road and he did as well, leaving the owl behind them to continue screaming into the night.

"Hey, I wasn't the only one who looked lost all the time back there, you know," he replied to her a little dryly.

"I guess not... but you always managed to look loster." That one came with another one of those very small, satisfied smiles that he only ever caught on her face briefly, often so briefly he wasn't sure if it had been there at all or just been a trick of the light.

"Sounds like something Laura would say," he replied, a tiny smile of his own starting to curl the corners of his mouth.

"Maybe she's been rubbing off on me a little."

"That wouldn't surprise me... she has a way of doing that."

There had been two or three times he had almost caught himself using words that hadn't escaped his mouth since elementary school in retort to her teasing. Sooner or later he wouldn't be able to catch it in time and then he would truly have descended to her level.

"She didn't even move when that owl screeched," Angela noted after a moment, fondness in her voice.

"Yeah... she's pretty fearless... back in that town, she barely had a care in the world..."

"Yes, well... I suppose it looked different to her." She said this sedately, and he found himself nodding even though he was ahead of her and she couldn't see. It was obvious they had both reached the same conclusion about the nature of Silent Hill, and what they'd seen there.

It was the sort of statement that usually seemed to lead to a period of thoughtful silence between them, but Angela spoke up again, a sly note in her voice... "When that owl screeched... you thought it was a monster, didn't you?"

James froze, then swallowed... then admitted, with a shaky laugh, "... Y-yeah.... yeah, I did. ... That obvious, huh?"

"A little," said Angela, clearly amused. "I might have too... if I hadn't heard owls all the time." She was quiet a second or two, then added in a smug whisper, "City boy."

"Now come on, don't rub it in," James scolded indignantly, but the fear and relief had mingled into a weird giddiness and he found himself grinning. "...'Sides, you can hardly blame me..."

"I guess not..." Angela admitted, still sounding rather pleased with herself. Then, lowering her voice conspiratorially; "... But don't worry. I'm pretty sure if there were any monsters following us, they'd have gotten us by now with how slow we're going."

"Unless they wanted to scare us first. To.... to... make us taste better. You know. The fear. It's like... like..." he faltered there, what had started as a morbid joke sputtering out halfway through. "Like..."

"Tenderizer?" Angela supplied.

"... Yes. Like tenderizer."

"Well, if fear is tenderizer, I guess I have nothing to worry about... after that owl thing, you're much tastier than me."

"Hey, what did I say about rubbing it in?"

"Fine, fine... men are so touchy someti— oh!" She let out a little gasp and froze as a branch snapped somewhere in the trees to their right. James stopped with her, turning his flashlight in the direction of the sound and casting it about for a few seconds. When nothing in particular jumped out as the source, he looked back to her with a commiserating smile.

"P-probably just an animal... at this rate if there were any monsters around, Laura would be the only one left. With all this fear, we gotta be gourmet by now."

At first Angela looked to him with wide, still-startled eyes... but when she caught sight of his sheepish grin and seemed to realize that he'd jumped at the sound just as hard as she had, her little smile reappeared and both of them burst into hushed, semi-hysterical laughter for a few seconds.

Then the crunch of gritty mud and pebbles resumed as they carried on.

"So..." Angela said after awhile, between the short panting breaths she was now taking as she tried to keep her living cargo from sliding too far down on her back, "... she was your wife's daughter?"

"... Sort of... in everything but blood and legality, I guess..."

"Legality?"

She paused behind him and it was a second or two before her plodding footsteps started up again.

"No..." James let out a sigh, voice growing heavy as the giddiness from before faded. "Mary... my wife died before anything like that could happen." If there was one thing (beside the weight of his own crime, of course) that he would probably never get over... it was that he hadn't known about Laura before Mary had passed away.

Like she'd been living a secret life, one that he hadn't cared or deserved to know about.

"... So... so where was she before she came with you, then?"

"An orphanage..."

"But... she's not adopted? You didn't adopt her?"

"No."

He knew he didn't need to clarify further that no orphanage would adopt to someone like him on such short notice.

Angela's footsteps stopped behind him again and this time they didn't start back up. He looked over his shoulder and saw her standing in the road with her arms still looped around Laura's legs, watching him uncertainly.

"So... why is she with you?"

James considered his reply for a moment. He didn't want to break Laura's confidence, what little of it he had, by telling her secrets... so he settled on saying, shortly but meaningfully, "It was a bad place."

Then he turned and continued to walk.

A quiet "Oh..." sounded behind him and he could hear Angela's steps in the dirt again, hurrying to catch up with him.

After that they walked in silence for quite some time. At some point, a slow, steady drizzle began to sprinkle down from the dense clouds overhead.

As the length of nothing-but-forest they'd traveled grew, James's already-limited hopes of finding any form of civilization began to dwindle. His feet were sore— he hadn't walked this far in some time. For all the ground they had covered since leaving home, most of it had been on wheels.

He was on the very verge of suggesting they turn back and continue their slogging journey along the main road, when a glimpse of something pale through the trees caught his eye.

"... Angela! Look!"

He jogged forward, sore feet forgotten as he hurried down the road until he could see around the grove of trees blocking his view.

And there it was.

A barn, nestled on the other end of a small, overgrown thicket. It sat in the burry brambles and thistle like an abandoned milk carton, its windows dark.

"It's a barn!" James blurted out unnecessarily.

Angela drew up alongside him, hucking the sleeping (or perhaps just petulantly sulking) Laura up a little higher on her shoulders.

"A barn? All the way out here? That must mean there's people nearby," she said breathlessly. "Do you... do you see any other buildings?"

He took a step into the thicket and felt the ground sink slightly beneath his boots. It was soggy, unkempt meadow-earth. Perhaps at one point it had been a pasture, but now it seemed fit for little but the grazing of wildlife.

"... I don't see anything... maybe if we go further, but..."

As though he was stepping into a field of poppies instead of weeds and loosestrife, James felt tiredness seep up his legs and into the rest of his body at the thought of delving into the woodlands in search of buildings that may or may not be there. And chances were, they probably weren't. This barn looked like it hadn't been touched in years and a house with lit windows would surely be visible in darkness like this, even if there were trees in the way.

"Did we find a house?"

Laura had spoken up at last, lifting her head. She was rubbing one eye with a fist, her face scrunched and squinty.

"I don't think so..." He peered dubiously at the ramshackle building.

It was an ugly thing, partly white and partly plain, undecorated planking. The paint was flecked and the visible wood looked weathered and worn. Tiny windows sat at the top, just under the shingled roof, and they were black and empty like little eye sockets set in a skull too big for them. The more James looked at it, the more certain he felt that no one but them had set eye on it in a long time.

"... I'm not sure we'll find anything here. It looks empty. But... there might be more buildings further on, so..."

"I don't wanna keep going," moaned Laura. "It's dark and raining. I hate it."

James looked to Angela for her input. He'd brought them this far, but he didn't want to keep going any more than Laura did and he didn't quite have the heart to keep arguing with grownup logic when all he wanted to do was lie down somewhere.

"... Let's take a look at the barn," Angela finally said. "It can't hurt anything, can it? We've already come this far in the dark."

"I don't wanna go in there either. It looks spooky," Laura groused, sounding more disgruntled than actually frightened. "What if there's monsters."

"If there's any monsters, we'll protect you." At that, Angela looked up and met James's eyes, the same light that he'd seen back in the car when they'd spoken of the creature in the piston room kindling in her own. "Right, James?"

He nodded.

"Right."

"Fine," Laura mumbled grumpily as they set off across the meadow.

Tiny thorns and stickers tugged at his jeans as he walked, picking his legs up awkwardly high to avoid them, barely able to see in the dark even with the help of the flashlight. Behind him, he heard Angela murmur to the girl that she needed to put her down now. Then rustles and an extra set of footsteps as Laura was set on the ground and then took to scampering carelessly forward through the overgrown brush, daring the thorns to have a go at her.

Reaching the side of the barn, James started to tramp along its edge, searching for a doorway and locating one without too much hassle. There were several abandoned rabbit hutches on either side of it; their latches hanging open lonesomely, tufts of hay and gathered dust poking from their chickenwire siding. It was a sign that didn't bode particularly well for chances of the place being occupied, but at this point James found all he wanted was a place to bunker down for the night. Everything would just seem so much easier in the light of the morning...

The sheet-metal of the door groaned and rattled as it shifted under his pull, then scraped to a halt, leaving a crooked two-foot crack to squeeze through. It would go no further.

James leaned into the gap, poking the flashlight in. It illuminated an unsurprising scene: empty stalls and rafters littered with cobwebs and bundles of straw and twine where mice and birds had nested for what was probably several generations. The air inside was still, sweet, and musty.

He looked back to Angela and Laura.

"... Yeah... it doesn't look like anybody's been here in a long time... but it's dry. You guys wait here though, I'll go in first just in ca—"

"Lemme through, I wanna get dry," Laura demanded pompously, shoving straight past him.

He made a noise like a dying balloon and reached after her, before looking helplessly to Angela, whose face was solemn in the flashlight's beam.

"Some things have stayed the same, but I haven't seen any actual monsters since I was in Silent Hill," she said, all traces of the joking from earlier gone. "I think... it should be okay."

"... Yeah. Of course..." And no matter what things his imagination had conjured up during the long walk through the night, he knew she was right— but a sour curl of guilt started up in his stomach.

There was no easy way to bring up the fact that he had been seeing monsters.

Instead he squeezed into the barn after Laura, the scent of old hay tickling his nostrils as he dusted himself off and took a more thorough look around.

The place had probably been used for horses once. Now it was clearly home to nothing more than the forest's inhabitants and an old ridable lawn mower that had been parked in one of the stalls, under several layers of dust by now. Shining the flashlight into the rafters returned a small trio of eerie reflective eyebeams that turned out to be some more owls, nestled away in a corner.

Rustles and squeaks coming from the loft above told him that there were probably some rodents skittering around, too.

A few buckets and rusty pitchforks lay strewn around and there was a pile of stained old horse blankets laying crumpled next to a set of grain bins that had long since been chewed into.

But the important thing was that it was dry.

A drumming had started up above their heads as the rain began to thicken from a sprinkling to a steady pour. James shivered and gave his damp hair a shake. The rain hadn't been hard enough to soak them— just to coat them in cool moisture and put a chill in their bones. But if they decided to carry on, they'd end up soaked in seconds.

"I guess this is better than noth— ghhkkk."

Laura had popped out of one of the vacant stalls with a "BOO!" that seemed deafening in the silence. James staggered backwards a step or two, placing a hand over his chest.

"Jeez," he said under his breath reproachfully, but didn't bother trying to scold her. Angela let out a soft giggle by the pile of blankets, one of which she'd picked up and was turning forwards and backwards, critically.

"Who d'you think this place belongs to?" Laura asked, as though she hadn't just nearly given him a heart attack.

"Dunno. Nobody, maybe."

"Abandoned places are pretty common the further out you get... there were lots of old empty farmhouses around where I lived when I was little," Angela supplied, smoothing out the fabric with the characteristic shuff shuff of skin on nylon.

"I guess that's probably what this place is... it doesn't look like anyone but animals've been here in ages."

"Do you think we should keep going down the road?" Angela asked, folding the blanket over her arms and looking at him. He could tell from her expression that she was about as fond of the idea as he was.

"Honestly, I... I doubt we'd find much. Not in the dark like this. I think... I think maybe it'd be best if we just stayed here. Maybe in the morning we'll actually be able to go back out on the real road and flag someone down. ... Or walk back to the last town, if we have to."

With a heavy sigh, he nudged an overturned bucket upright with the toe of one boot and then sat down on it, elbows on his knees. It felt good to sit. He didn't know how long they'd been out there, but it seemed like forever. Forever was not a fun amount of time to be stumbling down spooky country roads in the middle of the night.

"You mean we're gonna sleep in here?" Seemingly forgetting her initial displeasure at the thought of going inside, Laura seemed excited. She looked around, pulling her arms back into her sweatshirt so that the sleeves hung limply at her sides. "Here in this moldy ol' barn? Are we really gonna? It's probably haunted."

"I hope not," James said wearily, starting to reach down and pull his boots off. Then he thought about all the potential rusty nails lying around under the scattered leaves and sawdust and rethought it. It was already a miracle he hadn't somehow contracted lockjaw in Silent Hill, and he wasn't about to push his luck. "This night is lousy enough without ghosts."

"But what if they're PONY ghosts," Laura insisted, running to peer into the stalls again. "Cuz ponies used to live here, you know. These are pony stalls."

"I guess pony ghosts wouldn't be too bad." He peeled off his coat and draped it over one of the grain bins, hoping that it would dry out during the night. Nothing was worse than a damp coat. "As long as they're quiet."

"Give me the flashlight! I wanna go look for the pony ghosts."

James handed it over without a fight. He didn't want to look around too thoroughly. He was already fighting hard to shut out the instincts that were clamoring from their cages in the back of his brain, urging him to hunt through the stalls for useful odds and ends, to fortify the entrances and board up the holes. To ferret out any hiding threats and eliminate them before they could cash in their element of surprise. Even though there weren't any.

The girl scampered off again, the light bouncing ahead of her.

James dragged a hand down his face and heaved another exhausted sigh before turning his attention to the piles of hay. Most of it seemed to have fallen down from a rotten section of the loft that had given way at some point. He reached out a hand and tested it.

If felt dry enough despite the damp night outside, and it was soft and springy (if a little scratchy).

He rose from the feed-bucket he'd been using as a seat and lowered himself into the hay experimentally, letting the heels of his boots slide out across the floor. Not the most luxurious bed around, but it was better than trying to sleep in the dirt. And he knew he had to sleep.

He could try staying up all night, sure, but the certain knowledge that they would have to take a long uphill trek back up that dirt road to the car, if not all the way back to a different town, loomed overhead like the oppressive clouds that had been dripping on them for the past hour. He'd already been getting too little sleep as it was. No need to make that journey any harder than necessary.

There was a low rasp from somewhere overhead— either from the owls or some other animal that was taking refuge up there.

His brain knew that was all it was, but his body still tensed up, suddenly aware of every raindrop on the tin roof above, every itchy stalk of hay prickling against his skin.

... God, it was going to be hell to sleep in here, wasn't it.

As he ruminated morosely on the ordeal he was in for, Angela, who still had the other flashlight, stepped over and set it down in the middle of the floor, creating a soft little area of illumination. She'd been gazing out the gap in the door, back at the rain-lashed meadow. Perhaps she was hoping to see a car slowly trundling down the dirt road.

"... I hope the light doesn't run out of batteries..." she sighed after a moment, looking down at the light and holding her hands out to it as if it were a campfire.

James shook his head a little. "It shouldn't. I haven't used used it more than... well, ever. So... the batteries should still be brand new."

... Brand new.

A horrible thought struck him.

Actually, not a thought.

A memory.

He shuddered, the dampness that had accumulated on his clothes and skin suddenly seeming to sink in, and drew his knees to his chest. The chill of the early New England spring in which he had explored Silent Hill had departed long ago, traded for the wet, heavy warmth of a New England summer— so he'd taken to wearing just a wifebeater under his coat.

Right now he was regretting it.

Not only did he feel chilled to the bone, but the prickling of the hay was even worse. In fact, it felt just like scratchy insect legs of fear crawling up his back. His breath caught in his throat and he froze in place. When he could finally unlock his limbs enough to move, it was only to slowly reach up and smack the flashlight on his chest. Because it had just, after gleaming brightly with no falter or fade for hours and with no apparent reason, gone out.

The strike yielded no light, not even a dim sputter.

James breathed sharply through his nose, feeling his collar grow uncomfortably hot and his heart-rate slowly begin to accelerate into a steadily-rising pound.

Calm.

He had to stay calm.

He couldn't panic.

It was dark, that was all.

He'd find his way back out and then look for another light source. That was all there was to it.

Reaching out, he met the wall with his fingertips and started to explore the room with touch. Not that there was a lot to explore... He had come into this tiny padded cell sniffing for useful odds and ends, shutting the door behind him on principal— a precaution against getting ambushed by anything that might happen down the hall at the wrong time. He hadn't thought anything of the fact that he'd effectively shut himself into a space barely bigger than the length of two men lying head to toe... until he'd lost his light.

His own breath was deafening in here, and it was driving him mad.

Finally, his fingers found the tiny gap where the door met the wall. Yes! There it was. Now, to open it... but... where was the damn knob? He felt downwards impatiently. He had to get out of here—it was absolutely all in his head, but imagination or not, it was getting hard to breathe in here. How on earth could a patient stand being in a place like this?! Maybe with a light it would be livable, but in the dark like this, it was positively inhumane. And he had a feeling that asylum inmates didn't get graciously equipped with a flashlight before getting shoved into one of these things.

At last, once he'd moved a step to the right, his hand bumped into a panel next to the door. Further experimental prodding determined that there were buttons.

Buttons? REALLY? They put a number pad in a cell?

He cursed, squinting his eyes to make out its faint outline. The buttons themselves were barely visible as slightly-paler blots on a dark shape. Trying to make out the writing on them was just flat-out impossible. Nonetheless, he started punching them at random, trying to fight back his frustration to manageable levels.

The claustrophobia was already taking a toll on him and he didn't want it to get worse. Already he could feel an awful skittering on his skin, like there were things crawling on hi—

"Ow!"

His own yelp was startlingly loud in the silence, as was the slap of his hand meeting the back of his neck.

What the hell was that?!

A bite. Something had bitten him, right where his collar ended, just below the hair on the nape of his neck.

Another sting lit up on his arm— fainter this time, like something was pinching through the cloth of his coat, but still noticeable.

And that was when his hand— the one that he clapped to his neck— encountered something that was not supposed to be there.

Hissing in surprise, he closed his fingers around it with a terrible crunch and ripped it away. He could barely see in the dark, but he could see well enough to tell what it was.

A bug.

A giant, bloated bug with long, whiplike antennae and six awful spindly legs. It had burst under the force of his panicked grab, a little wet balloon of glistening guts oozing out of a crack in its exoskeleton before deflating and dribbling away to wet his fingers. But its legs continued to wave feebly at him.

He threw it down with a noise of disgust and snuffed out the rest of its life with his heel.

But that was when he felt a skittering up his ankle.

And another, this time from inside his sleeve.

Uttering a close-lipped howl, James started to slap frantically at his clothes. There were more joining in— he could hear them now, scuttling down the walls and across the floor, their tiny chirps and squeaks, the weird cicada-like whirring of their wings, the occasional crunch and squirt of innards as they occasionally got underfoot.

He could feel welts rising on his torso as the bites accumulated— short of tearing off all his clothing, the only way he could get rid of them was to crush them against his own skin.

"ARRRGH! Get OFF!"

He thrashed an arm against the wall, trying to knock off the creatures that clung to it— only to realize with horror that the walls were coated in them.

They... they were everywhere!

Where were they even coming from?!

He'd seem them before— they were the same disgusting, cockroach-like things he'd occasionally caught a glimpse of outside, except there, they'd usually been scurrying out of view at the sight of him, and he'd never seen this many of them at one time. They scuttled from shadow to shadow in ones and twos, never staying in the light for long. Now that he was trapped in a tiny, dark place just like the ones they sought out for refuge, they were doing the opposite, en masse.

... That was it!

They hated the light!

He beat the flashlight again, hoping against hope, but it remained nothing but a useless lump of metal hanging off of his chest. The batteries were dead, as though the room itself had somehow sucked the life right out of them.

"DAMN!"

How could they have lost their strength so quickly? They'd been brand NEW when he found them, just like the flashlight itself. But whether or not it made sense, they were dead, and without them he didn't have a hope of—

Wait!

The batteries!

He'd found a spare set earlier!

His hands flew to his pockets immediately.

Wallet... no.

Map? No.

Ammo? NO. If he was stupid enough to actually try SHOOTING at these things, he'd wind up blowing off his own foot. And then the blood would probably attract even more of them.

He didn't even realize his fingers had actually encountered the spare battery pack until it had slipped out of them and clattered to the floor.

He wanted to cry.

Flinging himself to the floor, he scrabbled about frantically, batting away the insects and occasionally biting his lip in revulsion when he felt the crunch of chitin and splatter of goo under his hands. Stinging bites and welts were still bubbling up on his skin even as he found the box and shredded the cardboard apart.

With clumsy fingers, he grappled the chunky batteries from their stiff plastic packaging...

The inside of his eyelids lit up in molten red, as Angela moved back out of the path of the light.

"James?"

He blinked and looked up at her. She'd apparently come over to stand between him and the light, looking down at him in concern. He swallowed guiltily. It happened again, didn't it?

"... Are you all right?" she prompted again, brows furrowed. "You looked kind of... faraway, for a moment. ... A few moments, actually..."

"Oh... I was just... um, thinking." A particularly sharp stalk of hay poked at his back as he shifted, and he felt what he'd eaten for dinner turn over in his stomach as the phantom sensations of dozens of squashed insects trapped between his clothes and his skin flared up all over him. Uncomfortably aware that Angela's gaze was still on him, he lifted his hands to rub sheepishly at the goosebumps that had sprung up on his bare arms. "I-it's nothing... where's Laura?"

"I think," Angela said, doing him the courtesy of not prying further, "she's in one of the stalls, pretending to brush a ghost pony."

"... Yeah, that sounds like something she'd do."

At least she was entertaining herself. Hopefully there wasn't anything in there that she could injure herself on.

Trying to banish the creepy-crawly memories, James sighed and leaned back. He could hear dripping somewhere, between the pattering of the rain on the roof and the leaves. There were probably leaks in this building, as old as it was. But they weren't over the hay, so that was good enough for him. Still, it was a lonely reminder of where they were, and how far away it was from where they wanted to be.

"... I'm sorry... For getting us into this mess."

Angela paused before replying, seeming to select her words carefully.

"... No, it's... things happen."

After everything— after all he'd been through, with Angela and without, with Laura and without, something about that struck James as the most apt description of it all that he'd ever heard. A soft chuff of laughter worked up from his lungs, and he couldn't help but let his mouth form a slightly reluctant smirk.

Angela tilted her head.

"What's so funny?"

"Oh, it's... it's not that funny. Not really. Just... well. Anyway." He ran his fingers through his hair. "We'll go back up the road once it's light. ... If we're lucky, maybe someone will pass who can give us a ride back to town so we can pick up some gas. Even with the leak, if I can get some in there... we should be able to make it back to the last town."

Angela didn't reply, but when he looked up at her, she was nodding. Straw crackled under her tennis shoes as she stepped onto the pile to reach the wall of the barn and lean on it, sighing. James swallowed, feeling like he should say something... but didn't.

The silence stretched from seconds to minutes, watching the rain pattering down through the gap in the door, visible only as a series of flashes as the drops caught the light cast by their little electric campfire. Outside of the rainfall and the sounds of Laura puttering around over in the empty stall she was playing in, all was quiet.

After what seemed like an hour, Angela lifted a hand to her mouth to stifle a yawn, her eyes fluttering. Her gentle swaying had started to take on a distinctly tired, unsteady rhythm. It was late, after all. It had been close to nine when the car had sputtered to a halt. God, who even knew what time it was now.

James swallowed as he watched, then cleared his throat. He wasn't sure what to expect— or even whether or not it would be a good idea— but after a little bit of waffling, he spoke up.

"... Angela?"

When she turned her head to look at him, he reached out to pat the hay, somewhat nervously.

"It's... kinda scratchy, but it's not bad. If you're tired... m-maybe you should try and get some sleep before morning." Then, before she could object, he raised both hands. "I'm dog tired myself and there's plenty of hay to go around, we don't even have to be close to each other. I'll... I'll probably sleep on my side, so I'll... you know, face the other way..."

Angela let out a chuff through her nostrils and gave him a look that was somewhere between dubious and resigned, one brow raised.

He stared back, glibly, then shrugged. "Beats standing..."

He was prepared to go back to gazing at the flashlight with half-shut eyes, but a rustling of hay reached his ears. Angela was slowly picking her way through the pile towards him, and when she reached his side, she lowered herself down into the hay next to him. Crossing her legs, she tucked her elbows in close to her sides, as though afraid of breaching some sort of electric wall between them.

Self-consciously, James folded his own hands in his lap. The last thing he wanted was to accidentally touch and frighten her, destroying what little trust they'd built up between them so far.

Once she was seated, the silence resumed with them looking awkwardly off in different directions, Angela idly toying with a stalk of hay and James just staring rather hard at a bundle of wire fencing in the corner that looked like it had seen better days. After awhile the prickling of the only available bedding started getting to him and he reached out to reclaim his coat even then it wasn't dry yet. At this point he'd take being damp over having memories of those bugs skittering through his brain all night long.

Angela had looked over when she heard him reach out, and he could feel her eyes on him as he awkwardly pulled it back on, then sat back with a satisfied shiver. There... no more itching. Thank god.

He had gone back to looking at the ruined fencing and wondering if it had ever even gotten to be used (or if it was just left to gather rust and dust, never to secure a single chicken) when he felt a light touch on his arm and looked over, surprised.

"... Those red squares..." Angela murmured, fingers shyly tracing the crooked, haphazard stitching. "... I don't remember those being there back in Silent Hill. Are they new?"

"Oh, those? Uh... yeah... I put them on just a day or so after I got back fr— left Silent Hill."

Because really, had he ever really gotten back to anywhere from that horrible place?

She continued to touch the squares gently, and he found himself holding his arm out obligingly.

"You used to have a different patch there, right?"

"Yes..."

He was surprised she'd noticed. But then, seemingly-insignificant details had frequently leaped out at him back there in Silent Hill. Maybe it was the same for her.

"What are they for?"

"... To remember." He looked away, casting his eyes once again to the flashlight and its comforting glow. "... Before I came to Silent Hill, I... I forgot a lot of things. Important things. When it was over and done with, I... I put the squares on my coat to make sure I never forgot again."

"... Oh..." Angela nodded, but her mouth had tugged into a troubled frown. Slowly, she pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, staring glassily forward. "... I... I wish I knew what it was like to forget. ... Some things I'd do anything to forget."

He looked over at her, feeling a tightness in his chest. It was the ache of sympathy.

"... I wish I could forget, too. ... But for me, forgetting was part of what landed me in Silent Hill in the first place." If he'd come to his senses and just turned himself over to the police with a confession after... what he'd done, he'd be just as guilty but his fate probably wouldn't have involved a phantom letter and a trip to the other side of reality. His damp hair stood on end as he ran his fingers through it again. "... It's... it's my duty to remember, now."

"Your cross to bear?" Angela said dryly, looking straight ahead— but her expression was more weary than jeering.

"Well... yes, I... I guess that's one way you could put it..."

There was a brief silence, then Angela pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, letting her chin sit between the kneecaps and staring, glossy-eyed, at the flashlight.

"I suppose being forced to remember the things we don't want to is just part of being in Hell," she murmured, the dry tone gone and replaced with tired resignation.

James looked at her for a time, watching the light play on her face and glimmer off of the liquid pooling in the crescent of her lower eyelid, waiting to fall.

"... Angela?"

She didn't quite turn her head to look at him, but she inclined it slightly. "... Yes, James?"

He cleared his throat before speaking in a voice that was small but firm in the quiet of their ramshackle shelter.

"The fire you see... you don't deserve it. I'll bet... I'll bet that you never did. You probably don't think so... but I do. ... I... I know my opinion probably doesn't count for a whole lot, but..."

She didn't say anything at first, so James looked away, picking idly at some loose threads on his sleeve.

"... I... just thought I'd let you know..."

"No, it's... thank you."

She sounded puzzled, but as she lifted an arm to swipe at her eyes, there was a faint curl to the corners of her mouth. Inhaling deeply, she looked out at the dark meadow again.

"... I don't see it right now, you know." Although she didn't turn around, she seemed to sense his questioning look, because she added, almost dreamily, "The fire, I mean. Listen."

She pointed up at the roof over their heads, and James leaned back to let his eyes follow suit. The rain drummed there softly but persistently. After a moment or two, James shook his head a little.

"... I don't hear anything but the rain..."

"Exactly." Eyes still moist, she smiled tightly and rolled her shoulders, nodding around at their surroundings. "I can still smell the smoke, like it's just around the corner... but out there, I can see steam rising from the meadow, where the rain is hitting. I can hear it hissing as the earth cools. ... And more than the smoke... I smell the rain."

The smile grew.

"... I haven't smelled rain since..."

She trailed off there, shutting her eyes, and at last the waiting tear rolled down her cheek and into the crinkle at the corner of her mouth.

James watched her with an indescribable feeling in his chest.

The constant dreary weather this summer had been dull at best and depressing at worst. He couldn't ever remember being so disenchanted with rain and cloudy skies. ... But here Angela was, weeping softly at the sound of it— the fresh, cool smell of it as the parched earth of her nightmares drank it in.

To someone whose Hell was filled with fire, rain was beautiful.

Over in the empty stall, Laura had begun to hum a little tune. The light from her flashlight was flickering, but not from a dying battery. Little shadows with stubby legs and pointed ears danced and cavorted across the far wall— she was making puppets with her fingers.

Before long the whimsical parade of creatures became a drama unfolding between two characters, bunny created by the index and middle finger of one of Laura's hands and a toothsome monster represented by the other. Her humming dissolved into a murmured, imaginary conversation alternating between a deep voice and a squeaky one.

"'GURRRR, I'LL EAT YOU RIGHT UP!' .... 'Oh no you won't!'... 'OH YES I WILL!'"

The shadows began to snap at each other, the rabbit successfully avoiding the monster's jaws at every turn.

"... You said you were sorry for getting us into this mess, James," Angela said after awhile, her gaze once again drifting over to their light. "... But really, I... I should apologize too. If I hadn't refused to stay in the car, we wouldn't be here."

"I'm sure you had your reasons, Angela," said James, gently. He wasn't mad anymore. He'd honestly stopped being mad after they'd been walking for a little while. His frustration had been as much a product of his own anxiety as it was of his annoyance at Angela's lack of cooperation. "Anyway, there's... not much point in dwelling on what we coulda done differently. It won't change anything."

"I know, but I probably could have just... shut up and handled it. It's not like... it's not like anything would have happened..."

She trailed off there, mouth pulling into a tiny frown before the lower half of her face disappeared into the sheltered of her arms, leaving just her squinting eyes and furrowed brows visible as she stared into the light.

Something about the way she said it caught James's attention. He glanced at her sidelong, feeling a frown of his own start to come on. Happened?

Once again, as though sensing his thoughts, Angela lifted her chin from the confines of her sweater sleeves and spoke. "... I've been to that town before. That one I circled on the map. It was a couple of months before I graduated from high school. I had... I had just turned eighteen. I was running away from home. I thought... I thought maybe since I was a legal adult, I could finally leave. Even that took months of slowly building up to as I waited for my birthday, but I convinced myself... stupid, stupid. I was so stupid to think.... a-anyway, I was... trying to get to Canada. ... I don't really know what I thought I'd do when I got there, but... I tried."

"... Is that... how you learned to hitch-hike?" James couldn't help but ask, even though he didn't want to interrupt. It surprised him to hear that she'd tried to run away. Not because she didn't have plenty to run away from, but just because she didn't seem a lot like Laura.

Angela shrugged, a sad smile crossing her face.

"If doing it for the first time counts as learning... I was desperate. I went with the first people who pulled over, told them something about going to see family across the border..."

"... Did... did ya make it?" James asked hesitantly, although he had a sinking feeling that he already knew the answer to that.

It was confirmed when she shook her head morosely.

"No. I'd already been gone for about four days... It was late when I got into the car, and I fell asleep in the backseat sometime during the night. ... When I woke up in the morning, I was being dragged out of the car by him."

James's heart sank. Oh, no...

The shadows seemed starker than ever on Angela's face as she continued, eyes shut tightly— the same way he shut his when a vivid, unwanted image from his past, whether it was Silent Hill or before, thrust itself into his brain.

"I knew he would already have been looking for me, which was why I was scared to keep trying the buses... that I'd get off at a station somewhere and he'd already be there, waiting for me. I thought getting in a car with someone would be safer. ... I still don't know how he found me. The people driving... they must have... have made a phonecall while I was asleep.... They just stayed in the car and watched. ...Oh, God, he was so angry..."

She slumped then, head hanging, her hair hiding her face— James swallowed hard and sat in uncomfortable silence. He could see it so perfectly in his mind's eye. The tranquility of an early roadside morning shattered as the very creature she'd been trying to escape yanked her kicking and screaming out onto the asphalt, while the couple unknowingly enlisted to aid in her getaway stood by uncomfortably, realizing their good intentions had gone terribly wrong.

But if they realized it, they sure didn't stick their necks out for her afterwards, did they, uttered a murky voice in the back of James's head— the same voice that had given its two cents several times during his heated skirmish with Todd, the sicklight man. Maybe if one or both of them had gotten out and confronted Angela's father before he had a chance to leave with his recovered property in tow, she never would have been driven to do what she did. Maybe she'd never have ended up in Silent Hill, watching the world around her burn.

Bile rose in his throat and that was when realization dawned over him.

"... That's why you didn't want to sleep in the car... isn't it?"

Once more, she brought her arms up to wrap them around herself, clutching at her sleeves with knuckles like little white stones.

"... I'm sorry..."

"No, no, please d— you don't have to apologize. It's... I get it. I do!" he insisted, trying to resist the urge to clasp her shoulder. Hearing the story behind her behavior earlier was horrible, but it made everything seem clearer. So clear that it resonated with him in ways he could barely articulate. "There's things I can't do anymore, either. Sometimes they're stupid things, but... but they bring it right back. You know?"

She nodded, but when she spoke, her voice was dull.

"Because of what happened to you in that town?"

"... Well... mostly, yes, I guess." After a moment's thought, he bit his lip and rubbed the back of his neck. "I-I'm sorry... I shouldn't compare our situations. ... I... I guess you must've had a lot of things like that before Silent Hill even entered the picture, huh?"

She nodded again, but sighed and leaned back into the hay, crumbling a stalk of hay between her fingers and watching the pieces fall to the floor in a tiny golden pile that disappeared into her shadow. She may not have been happy, but at least she seemed to be relaxed. That was something.

"It doesn't really matter. If you know, you know, I suppose... anyway, I never tried to run away again after that. Even if I could have, I didn't... didn't really have the chance. After that, I couldn't even leave the house without permission. Even if it was just to take a walk. They only let me out to go to school... and once that was over, work. If I was home even twenty minutes late, I'd... well. It wasn't good. It wasn't good at all. If I... if I wanted to keep going out at all, I had to be careful..."

For all that he could relate, the specifics she was describing felt so foreign to James. Recalling his own high school days, he'd been mostly free to do as he wished. He could linger all he wanted before coming home— in fact, he was fairly certain that his father wouldn't have cared if he didn't show up at all, unless he got in at 3 AM and made a bunch of noise. Half the time he had nothing better to be doing than heading back to the apartment after school let out, but a trip to the drugstore for a soda or a half-hour spent pretending to do homework on the bleachers while the cheerleaders conveniently practiced nearby had been regular events.

No one had cared where he was at any given time.

What an existence Angela had lived... where the only people who did care only did for their own sick reasons.

The thought of rushing, every day, back to the hell she described— under threat of it getting even worse— was mind-boggling.

"... And no one knew? No one noticed?"

"No. Maybe... maybe some of them had suspicions. My father was always careful to keep me out of school until the bruises were gone, but there must have been days when he slipped up. But that was all they were, if they existed at all. Suspicions. ... It didn't matter either way." Eyes downcast, her voice went deep and sour. "If anyone knew, no one did anything about it. Not that that stopped him from assuming things every time I was the slightest bit late, even before I ran away... as if I would ever want anything to do with boys!"

Cheeks flushed, she gestured at the air with a clenched fist, injecting a gruff tone into her voice as she imitated her father.

"'I know what you're doing out there with all those gringuitos, you're letting them have you. You dirty, dirty girl! Puta sucia, you must hate this family! Tú odias a su padre!'"

She finished her rant by spitting viciously at the hay-strewn floor, at approximately the spot where she herself would have been standing in this bygone interaction she was reinacting.

James swallowed hard. He hadn't understood half of that, but by the venom in her voice he was sure some of it had been profane and silently thanked whoever was listening up there that she hadn't said it in English, considering Laura's close proximity. All the same, listening to it made his gut twist.

"'Family comes first,' he'd say. 'Family comes first!' And he'd say it right in front of Mama, like he wasn't talking about the things we— ... h-he did!" Her voice cracked there and she lifted a hand to wipe at her eyes. The tears leaking out of them now had nothing to do with the beauty of rain. "She knew anyway. She always knew. But in those conversations, she would look away and pretend. Pretend that he was just talking about the priorities any daughter should have."

James scooted backwards in the hay until he could lean against a more solid lump of it, trying not to think too hard about the things Angela was referring to. He also tried not to look at her as she spoke; it felt too invasive, somehow, for a subject like this. Instead he just faced the light and listened.

"When I was a little girl..." she continued hollowly. "Our family was so normal. Or felt that way. Now, when I look back, I can see little things. Little signs that it was going the way it would go. But mostly... mostly it felt normal. Felt happy. Even when it started... I thought maybe it was just going to happen once. Since he said... he said it was to help me become a woman."

There was a pause... then her voice tightened again.

"I was only ten, and it was the biggest secret I'd ever had to keep... but I was wrong. It kept happening. Eventually it was happening every night. And after a few years..." A bitter, frightening noise that had the sound of a laugh but none of the substance escaped her. "... It was no secret in that house."

"... And your mother..." James murmured, feeling sick to his stomach.

"You know what my mother said." Hugging her knees, Angela stared forward flatly, her eyes practically burning a hole in the hay-strewn floors. For a second, he could almost swear he saw smoke rising from the spot— but it was only steam, wafting through the flashlight's glow. "Anyway... a few years later, she left. And when she left, it was just me and them. And both of them were... they..."

She cut herself off there, shaking her head furiously. Even now, she couldn't bring herself to say it, and James didn't blame her.

Instead, she carried on, forging ahead despite the tightness in her throat. Like she was trying to get the rest of it out while she still had the cool, damp air for comfort. Before the fire returned.

"After high school, I got a job. A waitressing position, at a steakhouse in town. I thought maybe respectable work would make me feel better. ... Redeem me, after trying to run away. And I was so desperate. Anything to get me out of that house. Anything for a respite. ... But it wasn't. It was... it was horrible! The men there... I was nothing but meat to them. A juicy piece of meat being dangled in front of their noses, hung out for them to snap at like hungry dogs. And I felt like meat. Every day, coming home smelling like broiling steak, with pink handprints on my apron from where they put their juice-smeared hands every time I passed the table... The only ones who didn't were my father's friends and coworkers... and with them, it was only because they knew I was his, even if they didn't know the half of it. I hated it. I hated it! Pigs, they were all pigs!"

There was an extended silence while Angela fumed quietly for a moment and James squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. He'd never been the sort of man that Angela was describing, not even at his loneliest— but he'd seen the same behavior plenty of times, and never spoken up about it. Rude, but harmless, he'd always thought. Now he felt guilty by association.

"... And the boss was no better. He told me I should be flattered by it all. As if catching the eye of a bunch of slavering animals who'd grab at anything with a pair of breasts was some kind of achievement."

She shook her head slowly, a visible shudder of disgust running through her.

"He fired me, anyway. Took me aside one day and said that I made the customers uncomfortable when I didn't smile or laugh for them. Imagine that. Uncomfortable. I told him, I said, good, I'm glad they're uncomfortable! It took them physically putting their hands on me to make me uncomfortable, so if I could do the same thing just by not simpering like a bimbo for their idiot pleasure? Good! If that was all it took, they deserved it! That's what I told him. He fired me on the spot. Told me to hang up my apron and go home. So I did."

She let out a sharp huff, clearly fired up from recalling the incident. Once the vinegar went back out of her veins, her tone went dark and calm— but her eyes were still blazing.

"But on my way out, I took a knife with me. One from the kitchen. They had so many, I doubted they would miss one. ... And then that night... when Papa came into my room... there was nothing he could say when he saw the knife. He just laughed. Because he thought I didn't have the nerve to do it. Thought I was just bluffing."

Unfurling her fingers, she held her hands— hands that had undoubtedly once been covered in blood— up to the light. And then clenched her fists.

"But I wasn't. When he came at me... He looked so stupid and confused when the red started pouring out of him, dripping down onto his chest. Like he couldn't believe it. And he looked even more confused when I kept going. I kept going until he stopped moving. That was what he always did to ME, so I went and did it right back to him."

Her hands were shaking hard as she spoke, still holding them in front of her as though the knife she'd taken her father's life with— the knife James had thrown off the Overlook— were still in them.

"... And then I cried. I cried over his body. Is that strange? He was a monster and I hated him. But I still cried. Even though I was the one who killed him, and even though he was hurting me. It's not supposed to happen like that, is it?"

"I don't think it's so strange," murmured James despite himself, his thoughts drifting back to dark, cold places that he wanted to leave behind. Places where his breath turned to steam in front of him and the air smelled like salt licks.

"Hm," was her only reply to that, as though she had only half heard it. She stared into the light for awhile again. "... Afterwards, I went and took care of my brother. He was asleep and didn't see it coming. That was more wrong than killing Papa, I think. That one is why I'm in Hell. But... he was even crueler, sometimes. And... and sometimes... more and more... I would catch him looking at the little girl down the street. ... I... I couldn't let him..."

She trailed off into silence.

It stretched on between the pair of them, until James said quietly, "... I think you did the right thing."

They both knew that didn't mean a lot coming from a man like him, but Angela sniffed and whispered, "Thanks."

A low rumble of thunder rolled across the sky overhead, making its way east towards the far-off sea.

After a time, Angela shuddered slightly.

"... I'm a little cold, actually," she admitted. "... I'm... I'm happy the fire's gone, but... it's cold."

Sitting up straight, James started to roll the coat off of his shoulders. "You want my coat?"

"N-no... it's fine, I just... maybe..."

She ran her tongue across her lips, suddenly looking very nervous. Slowly— very slowly— she began to inch towards him. Then, once her shoulder was brushing his, she leaned into him with a feather-light touch, then incrementally more, like she was testing her weight on thin ice that could break at any moment.

Slightly stunned, James lifted an arm, preparing to put it around her, but she cut him off.

"No— don't. Don't touch me."

He stopped.

Instead of accepting an embrace, Angela proceeded to slip one arm around his, holding it first as though one might a slumbering snake— then more tightly when nothing unpleasant happened.

Shutting her eyes, she let out the breath she'd been holding in a long, shuddering sigh.

"... Better?" James asked after a moment, holding his arm as still as possible.

She considered, then nodded.

"Yes. A little."

James let his head loll back to rest on the straw, letting his eyes drift shut. With the way she was holding it, he could tell that his arm was going to fall asleep within moments— but maybe if he was lucky, he could beat it to the punch.

"Okay. I'm... m'gonna try and sleep. ... I-if I snore, just give me a poke, okay?"

"... Sure."

The summer storm continued to thicken outside, the trio's presence announced only by a thin golden line of light where the door was still cracked. With Laura's humming in their ears, they settled back into the hay and waited for morning.

~*~

The air was a soft wash of fuzzy sports commentary seeping out of the radio, nestled on a folded dishcloth on the windowsill just like it always was. A book was wedged under the window to keep it open, allowing the steam a place to escape although it still breathed puffs of cloudy fog onto the glass as it slipped out.

Warm, comforting aromas caressed every surface in the room— newly-laundered linen, dish soap, fresh bread.

The floor smelled of lemons and still squeaked under her feet when she moved them.

Everything was clean, and lovely.

Just like it had always been.

Angela scooped a handful of suds from the mound of them that sat atop the dishwater and cradled it in her palms like an egg. The bubbles were almost as white as the loose baby tooth that still wiggled in the corner of her mouth, too stubborn to come out.

She turned to her mother, whose hands were still occupied wiping down the dishes and setting them in the rack to dry, and presented it to her.

Mama, look!

Her mother looked down at her and smiled, drying her hands off on her apron before allowing Angela to deposit the suds into them. Then, still smiling, she lifted her hands up to her face and blew upon them, sending a portion of them floating freely into the air and drawing a peal of laughter from her daughter.

Gleefully, Angela reached out to collect more, only vaguely hearing the screen door slam out in the hallway behind them. Turning back to her mother, she raised her soapy hands to puff on them herself, only to freeze when she caught sight of the face now looking down on her.

The gentle affection upon it was gone, replaced by wide, livid eyes and a mouth twisted in disgust.

Mama?

Baffled and heartbroken, Angela looked down at her hands.

There were no bubbles.

Instead, coating her fingers was a wet, foul-smelling tangle of coarse dark hair and half-clotted blood.

Her eyes filled with tears as they continued to travel downwards, seeing that the pristine floor below her feet was now covered in mud, a trampled splatter of smudged footprints and smears of red. Her legs were coated in filth, and she could feel a sharp pain throbbing between them.

Why?

Angela reached for her mother again, but the woman backed away, repulsed— lifting her apron clear of the mess.

Mama, what's happening? I don't understand.

She sensed more than saw the shadow that fell across her as a presence loomed behind, so close that she could feel the heat radiating from it, a heat very different from the clean, sweet-smelling steam wafting out the window.

A hand laid itself upon her hip.



Angela sat bolt upright with a sound somewhere between a wheeze and a whimper, blinking wildly through the tears that had started to spill from her eyes before they'd even opened. The pressure across her front tumbled down into her lap limply when she dropped her arms from around it, and she flung it away from herself with a strangled whine before the hand she'd felt brushing her waist could explore any new possibilities presented by being so close to where her legs parted.

It wasn't until she saw the flash of bright red on muted green on the flopping arm that the present rushed back to her, and the solid weight at her side registered as something other than the shadow from her dream.

The muffled scream that had been fighting to escape her throat promptly died there, and she grew still as the rest of her surroundings came trickling in, the afterwash of her nightmare slowly popping away like foam left in the wake of a wave.

Pale pre-dawn light crept downwards through the holes in the ceiling, too dim to pepper the floor with visible spots, but still light enough to glint softly off the tousled golden hair of the man whose back was facing her, shoulders rising and falling in the slow, steady rhythm of deep sleep.

James's arm bent behind him at an awkward angle, remaining where it had landed after she'd thrown it off like a spider. But he hadn't stirred, even at the cry she'd let out when she'd done it. He remained nestled in the hay on his side, shrinking into his coat like a turtle into its shell.

For several long moments Angela simply sat, keenly aware of her own ragged breathing in the silence, and the puffs of pale steam it created in front of her. Summer still had a firm hold on the land, but here in the uninsulated shamble of the barn, with the last of yesterday's warmth sipped away by the night, they might as well not have been between any walls at all.

Even so, she knew the quivers shaking her body had nothing to do with the chill.

It wasn't until the paralyzation of fear finally trickled out of her that she felt safe to move at all, and she drew in a shaky breath, lifting a still-trembling hand to pull the strands of hair hanging in her face back behind one ear. Then she let the hand drop to her pocket, pressing the reassuringly-hard weight there against her thigh until the pain proved for sure that it had not been removed during the night.

She was safe.

Throughout it all, James remained dead to the world, and now that the phantom humming from her nightmare world had finally departed, she could hear the rattle of a small snore from the very back of his throat.

Wincing at the unavoidable rustling of hay around her legs, Angela shifted, scooting carefully back towards him and laying the quietest, most painstakingly careful hand on his shoulder. She intended to shake him just as much as she intended a soft call of “James...” to leave her throat as an actual vocalization, but the name sat in her mouth like a cloud she just couldn't expel, and she couldn't bring herself to touch him beyond letting her palm ghost over the messy stitches on his sleeve.

She withdrew the hand, giving up on what obviously wasn't going to happen. And James slept on, brow smooth and unfurrowed for the first time that she'd ever seen.

A week go, bile would have filled her throat at the thought of an expression that peaceful on the face of James Sunderland. Of any man, actually— but James in particular.

He'd been drawn to that town just as she had, and although she hadn't known him (not really), the discovery of his dark deed had come as a complete and utter non-surprise.

In her jaded eyes, every man was capable of the unthinkable, their scruples and mild manners little more than a disguise they wore to fit in. Whether or not they knew they were just another wolf in a sea of woolen costumes, her opinion sometimes fluctuated on. Sometimes society was so convincing in its apparent condemnation of it all that her father's careful concealment of his perversion made sense— his pristine reputation depended on keeping the perverted reality of the Orosco family hidden behind walls both literal and figurative. To the neighbors, he was a practically a saint; raising two teenagers by himself after their mother walked out. That was why he maintained such iron control over what she said and where she went. He may have been all-powerful, but there was still much he had to lose by slipping... supposedly.

Because other times, the world seemed to take outrageous pleasure in open cruelty.

If Angela could be said to have any faith left in humanity at all, she knew for sure that it dwindled further and further every time a rough slap on her ass was met with clapping and cheers from all the tables that had been waiting with bated breath for her to walk past.

It was in moments like those that Angela wondered if what went on in her house was as damning a secret as the years of being told to keep her mouth shut would have her believe.

She got shakily to her feet, plucking strands of hay off of herself. Her stomach had tightened, that bile threatening to flow up after all. If she was going to throw up, she didn't want to do it here in the barn next to a sleeping human being, like a cat furtively hacking up a hairball under the bed in the wee hours of the morning. So she crept to the door and slipped out into the open, standing to the side with her hands on her knees, eyes shut and breathing heavily.

Away from the musty, stale air of the barn, it didn't take long for the nausea to pass. Angela sucked in a last long gulp of the cool morning air and coughed wetly before straightening up and opening her eyes again.

Despite the absence of sun, the darkness that had cloaked the their path the night before had fled off between the trees, leaving a soft, silvery haze in its wake. She could see clear across the field now, to where a series of broken fence-posts had all but rejoined the forest. Little clouds of insects danced in the gaps, rejuvenated by the rain that had moistened the earth all night long, and the tangled brush of the meadow rose from a blanket of velvety mist.

This, too, was enough to make Angela's innards lurch again briefly. But she could tell this was the sort of fog that would burn off when the sun rose properly. Not like the thick, smokelike white walls that had billowed through Hell, obscuring her vision and filling her nostrils with the smell of burnt meat.

Angela looked back over her shoulder at the dark little crack in the wall that led back inside, where her companions still slept. Then back out across the field, uncertainty gnawing at her gut.

Back before her damnation, she had occasionally gone on early-morning walks— early morning, sometimes even while the sky was still dark, because that was the only time she could get away with it. Slipped out of bed and tiptoed down the stairs, ignoring the throbbing bruises from whatever had happened before her father had retired to his own bed, and then slipped outside to let fresh air and solitude make her forget her life for just a few minutes.

But as the years passed, it became harder and harder to do without watchful eyes seeing.

More and more her brother would be up at odd hours, plastered to his computer screen, where he watched grainy videos that took hours to download on their dial-up connection. The inconvenience of it meant that he would watch the same one for weeks sometimes, often enough that Angela could play the entire thing back in her head without even trying, down to every last moan and dull bassline beat, no matter how hard she tried to ignore the sound through the walls. Usually he did nothing to stop her from leaving, but he was always fully prepared to tell their father she had been out.

By the end, she honestly could not remember the last time she'd left the house that wasn't to go to work or run extremely restricted, specific errands. So specific that Papa had memorized the exact cost of every grocery on the list, the exact travel-time from house to store, even the exact weight that each bag should be.

'So that I know you're not doing anything you shouldn't be, like sneaking off with Daddy's money to buy snacks and get fat,' he often said, usually with a laugh that was not intended for her to share.

And there was no laughter at all if she came back five minutes later than she should have, or if the change she handed him was was even a penny off.

No, what awaited her if she strayed out of his rigid expectations were roared accusations, vicious slaps (punches, if he'd been drinking), and the collection, one way or another, of whatever he believed he was due.

Angela shifted from foot to foot, swallowing.

Her limbs still ached from walking the previous night, however far they'd actually gone. The trek had seemed endless, and there had been no way to judge time or distance whilst blundering around in the darkness. But if they were to actually find a house like James had wanted to, the earlier they got started, the better. It couldn't hurt, could it? To take a look around.

Even now, the guilt lingered, hovering around the edges of her mind and threatening to close back in at the first opportunity. There was still that constant sense, even without an active arbiter watching and judging, that whatever she was doing, she shouldn't be doing it.

But if she focused hard on the falseness of that feeling, it lightened her heart a little bit. To remember that she could, if she wanted. That despite all she'd been through even after ridding herself of her defilers, a horrible punishment inflicted for simply walking was no longer something she had to fear.

And it wasn't selfish, either.

Not here and now, on this backwoods road that they'd found themselves on by complete accident.

For all his misdeeds and frustrating quirks, James Sunderland had brought her this far, and stayed good. He had not demanded any payment in return for his expenditures, even though he'd surely been taking a loss by caring for her in addition to little Laura. And oh, don't think she hadn't been waiting for days, tensed and ready to run, for the demands to begin.

When they did, she'd have refused— of course she would have.

Her body had so little worth at this point, but she would clutch what tiny value remained with all the ferocity of a starving dog with a scrap of bone clenched in its teeth. And if James or anybody else wanted to take it from her, she would either rip them to pieces or they could take it from her cold dead hands.

She was prepared to do that much, in more ways than one.

But astonishingly... the demands never came.

They could have. But they didn't.

Such a thing was barely worthy of reward, and the thought that it should be made Angela curl her lip in disgust and mask a mirthless laugh to herself. But even so...

She wanted to do something in return.

This, too, was a surprise. Angela had sworn off feeling like she owed anyone anything a long time ago. But it was what it was. Was there any point in questioning it?

She looked out across the field again, fingers plucking at the hem of her sweater.

She took a step.

Then laughed at her own audacity, a sudden and startling sound in the meadow's pre-dawn silence, and turned around to apologetically squeeze back through the gap and into the barn.

She went in and out of the building a total of three times before finally deciding for sure that she would do it.

In the end, it took several deep lungfuls of air. Air to prove to herself that the smell of last night's rain— James's rain— was still real. That it hadn't been replaced by the dry, smoky haze of which she'd seen little else since entering the town of Silent Hill.

The first proper step away from the barn drew another laugh out of her, and this time it was one of relief.

Her foot had sunk down into the earth which she pressed it there, and she could feel a cold wetness seeping upwards into her sock through the sole of her shoe. Instead of yanking it back up immediately, she ground it deeper, sighing with something close to happiness. Yes, it was still here. Still wet. No scorched earth and heavy, gravelly ashes.

… But another step, just to be sure.

Once convinced beyond doubt, Angela started across the field for real, lifting her feet high to avoid dragging them through the worst of the undergrowth. It was tick season, after all, and growing up one step away from the woods meant she knew everything there was to know about the danger of Lyme and rocky mountain fever.

A soft chuff of laughter escaped her at the memory of the previous night, the instinctive worry that had risen in her as Laura boldly tromped through the miniature, knee-high jungle of plant life. She'd held her tongue— it wasn't her place to scold the girl, after all. But it had been an interesting feeling, those protective urges welling up.

The last time she'd felt anything like those had been...

Her name had been Isabella, and she'd been six the last time Angela had seen her. Maybe seven by now— it had been a long time. Dark-eyed and dark-skinned, she was a beautiful little girl, with parents who loved her the real way. They doted on her even though the long hours they worked didn't allow them much time at home, forcing them to rely on a babysitter who Angela's brother always made a point to go flirt with across the fence whenever her car was in the driveway.

But the babysitter had never been the real reason his attentions strayed over there so often.

Angela's throat tightened.

No, she didn't want to think about that little girl down the street.

She was safe now, and nothing had ever happened. Angela had made sure of that.


Slowing down, Angela shielded her eyes and looked out across the road. She was almost to the edge of the field, and now that it was light out, she could see that there were tire tracks in the dirt. Just enough for one vehicle, but they were there, and the rain hadn't washed them away, so they couldn't be that old...

It was definitely too early to go knocking on any doors. Out in old country like this, people got up early, but not this early. The world wasn't awake at all hours out here like it was in the city. But if she could find a house, she could at least report back to James and Laura with the full knowledge and satisfaction that they actually had a solid direction to go i—

“HEY!”

The shout came from directly behind her.

Angela whirled around, sucking in a wild gasp that burned as it went down. Only to find...

“Are you sleep-walking? I said good morning but you just walked off!”

It was Laura.

Her silver-blond hair was full of hay and her little dress was rumpled, but her eyes were bright and alert, and she was staring shrewdly up at Angela, her head tilted like a puppy trying to decide if it had actually heard the word 'walk' or not.

Angela clutched at her heart, trying to calm it. If the nightmare hadn't already jolted all her nerves awake, that sure would have in its place.

“Laura... I... I didn't hear you... y-you...”

“Did I scare you?” The little girl seemed delighted at the prospect, clapping her hands together and giggling impishly. Angela found herself trying to respond in kind, but managed only a feeble smile in return.

“Y... yes, you did. I wasn't expecting you to... follow me.”

“Well, I wanted t'see where you were goin'! Where are you goin'?”

“Oh, I...” Angela swallowed, shifting uneasily and trying to quash the guilt, which was already starting to creep back in. Laura's curiosity was healthy and normal, almost conspiratorial. Not angry. Not interrogating. But it was so hard not to think of it in those terms. Like she'd been caught in the act of something.

Like she was mounting the front doorsteps to her house and opening the door to find her father waiting at the foot of the staircase, eyes full of fire, with her brother peering smugly out from his room upstairs, eager to witness whatever was going to happen.

A little girl in a sweater so big it almost reached the bottom of her dress shouldn't be able to evoke those memories. But god, they came on anyway.

“I just thought... I thought I would walk down the road a little bit. To... to see if I could find a house, now that it's light out. I... I thought I would get back before you and James woke up... since you always, um... seem to like sleeping in.”

“Oh, only JAMES does THAT! I hate sleeping in, it's so boring. Don't you think it's boring?”

“I suppose so...”

Angela also hated sleeping in, when she was younger. But less out of boredom and more out of the fact that staying in bed only reminded her of what the bed had been used for. It saw more of something else than it saw of sleep.

She looked over at her shoulder at the little barn, hating that she couldn't command her guilty conscience to leave her be, to go back over there and curl up next to James if it wanted to stay in one spot so badly. To let her make herself useful of her own volition for once.

But Laura joining the equation had knocked her willpower off-kilter again. She'd encouraged herself to take that first step across the meadow by thinking of herself, alone with the quiet of the morning. Now it was different. Not even different in a bad way, just different. Which translated to bad whether she liked it or not.

Laura was sweet and full of a downright infectious energy, and her sometimes-constant chatter was usually a welcome reprieve from the hateful choir in Angela's head.

But quiet wasn't always oppressive, and this morning, Angela found herself in dire need of it.

And besides...

James had made it abundantly clear that as much as he wanted her around, he didn't like the idea of the two girls alone. It had made her angry at the time, when it had first come to the surface. But his worry was as contagious as Laura's spunk. And the more she thought about it, the more she understood.

She wasn't all right.

Neither was he, but that didn't change the facts.

Her arms moved up to hug themselves without her even realizing it.

“W-well... now that we're both up, we could... go back, and I could... keep you company. Th- … then we can all leave together. How does that sound?”

“What? I don't wanna stay in that moldy ol' barn, I wanna walk out here with you!”

Laura beamed up at Angela, looking for all the world like one of the children in the saccharine stock portraits you see in photography studio advertisements; blond, blue-eyed, and rosy-cheeked. Angela's second reserve of resolve promptly wilted.

“I... I suppose we could...”

The words had barely left her mouth before Laura had already sprung into a skip, bouncing happily off into the undergrowth and sending fog spinning off into nothingness in her wake. Like Bambi charging off into the meadow without waiting for his mother's judgment.

Accordingly, Angela's heart jolted in her chest just like the mother's must have.

But they were not deer, they were girls, and there wasn't a soul to be found out and about with them, friendly or otherwise.

“H-hey, just wait now...” Trying to hasten her pace, Angela moved to catch up.

“I couldn't sleep last night, so I just sat and made up stories,” Laura told her proudly once they were side by side again. “I made up one about a bunny and a monster. Then I made one up about a dog who was from space, so none of the other dogs liked him. But it was okay, because he had a spaceship and a ray gun, and the other dogs didn't.”

“Oh, that's... that's nice...” Angela commented feebly, trying to squeeze more comfort out of the wet earth below her feet.

“Yup! I think maybe I should be a writer when I grew up. I'm very good at stories. Everyone at the orphanage said so. Especially the Sisters, when I was trying to tell them why I shouldn't be in trouble. That's when they said I came up with my best stories.”

It quickly became clear that Laura was more than happy to carry a conversation by herself, which was fine, because just as quickly, Angela was realizing she didn't want to talk at all. The brief fire of determination that had flickered in her earlier had burned down to ashes again, and the sickly guilt had been all too happy to take its place.

Her hands found their way downwards from where they'd clutched her elbows, down to wrap around her stomach.

She found herself wishing that they had gone back to the barn, and was simultaneously ashamed of both having the thought and also of not obeying it. Laura's words, which she usually paid attention to, had faded to a vague buzzing in the background, and they were already halfway across the field by the time she said something that actually caught Angela's attention.

“Are you bleeding?”

“—w-what?”

“There!”

Laura pointed to the dark spot of blood on Angela's thigh. Mouth opening and closing a couple of times in wordless panic, Angela looked down and moved to cover it with her palm.

“I- …. i-it's nothing, I just— I cut myself when I was coming out of the barn. There was... there was a sharp edge on the door...”

“Was it rusty? If it was rusty, that means you hafta get a shot,” Laura said, nodding knowingly.

“N... no, I don't think it was...” Angela replied weakly, but was spared further explanation, because Laura's mile-a-minute mind had already moved on to the next topic of interest.

“Look!”

“What?” asked Angela as looked back up, feeling winded just trying to keep up with the conversation.

Laura was pointing.

“Look!” she said again, and this time Angela could see what she was talking about.

The darkened windows peeked out of the trees like owls' eyes, wary in its sheltered knothole. The house they were attached to looked old, but not abandoned like the barn back across the field. It was so well-hidden, they must have walked right past it in the dark.

Laura remained pointing, still wearing her triumphant smile. She was clearly very pleased with her find, not to mention the fact that she had spotted it first.

“A house!” she beamed. “I toldja we'd find one! We didn't even hafta leave the meadow! Wait'll we tell James! He might even smile. He never does that.”

Plopping her hands back onto her waist, she puffed out a satisfied breath and watched it steam in front of her before looking back over to Angela at last.

“I said, wait'll we tell James! … Angela? … Angel-ah!”

Angela had frozen in place, her skin as ashen as her insides.

It wasn't so uncommon, her brain told her. It had been repeating those words on loop, with each time ringing truer than the last. This layout and structure of building was all over the northeastern countryside, sometimes so much that her mother had jokingly referred to as 'country condos', back when her mother had still made jokes. Even the siding was slightly different, white instead of rustic, unpainted wood.

That didn't change the fact that she was looking up at a mirror image of the Orosco home, occupied by Thomas Orosco, his wife, and his children since the early eighties.

The very same windows had looked down on her the day after her tenth birthday, as her father led her by the hand across the backyard, towards the garden shed. When they came back out fifteen minutes later, the windows had turned into dark, disappointed eyes.

That was the last day her house had been home rather than a prison.

“Angela? What's wrong?”

She could not tear her eyes from the windows, even to look back at Laura. They were trapped in that gaze as inescapably as if she was eye to eye with a basilisk.

“Nothing,” she said, but her voice came out as a faint whisper that was barely audible even to her own ears.

The sights, sounds, and smells were all coming back. Torment by her endless gallery of painful and unwanted memories was nothing new, but none had visited her this vividly since leaving Silent Hill and escaping the immediate threat of meeting her demons in the flesh. And this, this particular memory was not one that had come back to her in some time.

But now it was.

Every bit.

She could remember the leaves crunching underfoot on her way to the shed. It had been autumn, and she'd been excited, kicking them this way and that.

After he had finished, her father had gone back to his yardwork almost as if nothing had happened. He raked with a vigorous energy, as though refreshed and rejuvenated by what had just taken place. He'd told her to go help Mama with the dishes, and she had obeyed without a second thought.

She watched him through the window as she lathered up the plates and mugs with dish-soap; watched as he collected every last fallen leaf into a pile and tossed a match into it, sending a dark pillar into the sky and filling the yard with the smell of smoke. It was as he was lighting up a cigarette that he looked up and caught her eye.

He had smiled and nodded, reaffirming the secret they were now keeping.

Beside her, her mother had gathered up a handful of bubbles and nudged her attention back, before blowing them into the air and laughing. Normally, this would have made her laugh, too.

But on that day, she had only forced a smile and then gone back to work, discreetly pulling down the hem of her shirt to hide the thumb-shaped bruises on her tiny hips, still bony with youth and not yet showing the soft broadness of the womanhood her father had described for her. Wondering all the while why, if what Papa had done with her in the shed had been normal, did she feel so ashamed?


Laura's smile had disappeared. The little girl had been speaking, her head cocked to the side with a furrow in her brow that never spent much time there under normal circumstances.

Something about how they should go knock on the door of the house.

But it all sounded very far away, and even though the words crept into her ears like little caterpillars, their insistence was lost. Her senses were too occupied to pay any attention.

In her mind's eye, she watched the smoke from the leaves billow and expand. It rose in pale curls, like little spirits making the migration up towards heaven, then darkened, turning blacker the higher it got and spreading across the sky like a bruise. She could see it filling the entire yard. It hadn't, in reality— burning leaves never did, unless the person burning them really had no idea what they were doing, and Papa knew his way around yard maintenance.

His burnings were always tidy and responsibly extinguished if they got too out-of-control.

But still it spilled outwards, gushing into the windows and right out of the realm of memory, thickening the air all around her. The trees fell out of focus as it rose— but it never rose higher than the windows, which continued to look down at her.

They stared.

And they judged.

They had seen it all.

They knew she had earned her place in Hell.

~*~

James floated up from sleep slowly.

The only thing he was immediately conscious of— before touch, before smell, before even the soft gray light that crept in between his cracked eyelids— was birdsong. It was different from the canned tweets and chirps that occasionally played on loop in hotel lobbies. The real stuff was much louder, and honestly made a great alarm.

The chatter and rustling of a flock of sparrows darting in and out of some bush that had the bad luck to be touching the side of the barn was what drew James's brain back into the world of the wakeful, and only then did the other sensations begin to drip back in.

He was lying on his side, deeply nestled in hay that crackled against his cheek and into the tender hollows of his neck. One arm was crushed tightly to his chest while the other laid awkwardly at his hip. Unlike the brain connected to them, both were soundly asleep, and felt as alien as if someone had stolen them away and replaced them with a pair of fat, useless sausages.

For quite some time, he simply laid there, gazing with lazy, out of focus eyes at the grain bins on the other side of his barely-even-makeshift bed. The parts of him that weren't numb were stiff and sore, and the chilly morning air nipped at the skin on his face. But it was warm inside his coat. And, even more remarkably, he realized that for the first time in weeks... he had woken up normally. Not been torn from a nightmare and left flailing in the sudden light of day when only minutes before, he'd been navigating an eternal night filled with hungry streets and even hungrier mouths.

In fact, he barely remembered falling asleep at all. He hadn't once woken up in an electric jolt of terror in the middle of the night, something that he always managed to do these days.

How ironic that the first good night of sleep he'd gotten in months was in this musty shack rather than a proper bed in a proper building in a proper patch of civilization.

He let his eyes slip shut again, just for a moment, relishing the prickle of feeling returning to his fingertips... then finally sat up, reaching up to clumsily rub the gunk from his eyelids and pick hay from his hair. His head felt like his Oldsmobile, held together mostly on hope and running on a leaky tank. But it was still better than the night before.

“Mmmh... Laura? A- … aahngela?”

He looked around, not bothering to fight the yawn that had snuck in halfway through his inquiry. His sleepy brain was sputtering like the aforementioned old car, trying to get itself up to speed.

The barn was no longer a dark cave of spiderwebs and splinters, but a shrine to older days, lit by a cloudy gray light filtering in from outside.

He was, however, alone.

There was no sign of his two companions anywhere besides two shallow depressions in the hay on either side of him, one smaller than the other. Laura must have wandered back over to sleep beside them at some point in the night.

The residents of the rafters above had vacated, and sparrow activity aside, there were no more rodentine rustles from the corners. Wisps of cobweb wafted gently from the ceiling, and a breeze from the outside was making wet foliage swish against the tin roof.

The flashlight was still on, its little bulb which had been so radiant and comforting the previous night now just a dull yellow spot against the ground, where it lay alongside the few things they'd brought with them from the car.

James reached out to pick it up and turn it off (batteries were expensive), rolling his shoulders with a grimace. They cracked as loud as if they were breaking, and the brief and powerful longing for a hot shower to drive the chill from his bones washed over him. But that would have to wait, possibly for awhile. Even so, the prospect of even the worst-case scenario— the long walk back to the last town they'd been in— seemed less daunting than it had the night before.

“Guys?” he called out again, getting to his feet with a hand propped on his knee. He dusted the rear of his jeans off and began to totter over to the mostly-shut door. Scraping it open any further would take more effort than he felt like putting into it after the night they'd all had, so he squeezed through with a grunt but otherwise surprisingly little difficulty. Apparently living on breakfasts and very little else was great for the waistline, if not for the canker-sores perpetually setting up shop in his mouth.

Squinting in the light of the open meadow, James shaded his eyes for a moment, waiting for them to catch up with the times. The sun was not yet all the way up— but the sky had lightened to a moist, pale silver and the wet greens of the field were frosted seafoam by the wash of mist covering them.

The sight should have set off alarm bells in his head, no matter how tired he was.

But it didn't.

He stepped out into the meadow, turning his head this way and that to look for any sign of the girls. Surely they hadn't left without him— the gas can and flashlight had been left behind, and while he had seriously considered the possibility right after Angela had joined them, he didn't think she'd do it now. Not after the talk they'd had last night.

“Angela? Laura?”

And then he heard it— voices from around the corner. Or a voice, anyway. Indistinct, but definitely Laura's enthusiastic morning babble. For the life of him, James's sad, leaky brain couldn't retain even a fraction of the many subjects Laura could cover in the space of one morning conversation, but by now he'd recognize the sound of it anywhere.

Damp earth squelching under his boots (still wet from last night... boy would that be fun to deal with on the long walk ahead), he started to head in the direction of the sound, picking his way around bushes and clumps of overgrown weeds. As he got closer, the sounds sharpened and became words.

“—gel-ah, are we gonna go knock on the door? Huh? … Are we? … If you're afraid, I can go do it. I'm not afraid of a house. The barn was scarier than that. … I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna knock!”

James rounded the corner, and saw Angela's stock-still outline immediately.

She was standing at the far end of the field with her back facing the barn, mere feet away from where the open ground ended and became forest. Her head was not turning, not even inclining towards Laura's voice. She was staring straight ahead, as though transfixed.

And that was what set off the alarm bells.

Because while Angela was honestly not much of a mover, even on the best of days, James could tell immediately that she was not standing at ease and admiring the lush summer foliage.

She was frozen like a rabbit who'd just been passed over by the shadow of a hawk.

“I said I was gonna knock!” Laura's voice had taken on an insistent pout, and she stepped forward to tug at Angela's sleeve, to no reaction or avail. James was too far away to hear her indignant puff, but he could see it dissipate in the air in front of her.

She tossed her head resolutely, her bright ponytail flashing in the mist like the fleeing hind of a whitetail fawn.

“Well, here I go!”

Without further ado, she stepped into the trees, making to tromp towards— was that a house? Yes, a house nestled there in the trees that they must have passed without even realizing, so well-hidden it was.

Relief briefly replaced the gnawing worry that Angela's frozen profile in the fog had awakened, and he started forwards to join them, clearing the accumulated gunk of sleep out of his throat so that he could tell Laura to wait, that he would go with her.

That was when it happened.

A branch on the ground caught the toe of one of Laura's shoes, making her bring her foot down on it reflexively. The snap of it breaking rang out through the morning quiet like a shot, and she stumbled, rattling a bush as she grabbed at it for balance. The branch, it turned out, was only a prelude for what was to follow.

The air exploded with a harsh chorus of CHWEE CHWEE CHWEE and a massive fluttering of tiny wings. Laura's fumble had disturbed a flock of birds previously taking shelter in the underbrush and out they came, whirring upwards in a chattering mass and perhaps seeking refuge on the other side of the meadow.

As surprised as the birds, Laura gasped sharply and overbalanced, landing on her rear in brush that almost came up to her nose when sitting. For once in her life she seemed too shocked for words, or indeed for anything but staring up at the tornado of tiny dark bodies spiraling upwards into the sky.

Unfortunately, said path had an obstacle: Angela.

A high, vibrating scream cut across the choir of birdcries, taking the pieces of silence left by Laura's stumble and shattering them even further. When the stream of birds didn't stop, the scream turned gibbering and terrified and she started to thrash, flailing against the onslaught and staggering backwards. A fall was inevitable, and she landed hard on the cold, soggy ground— her arms were too busy swatting and flailing at the birds to catch herself properly. But almost immediately she was scrambling upright again, too frantic to stay down.

The flock had taken little more than a moment to stream past and disperse into the sky, but Angela was still swatting and turning in circles as though still surrounded by a flurry of birds.

Dark blots of mud colored her previously-clean sweater, streaked across her elbows and rear. James was too far away to see the tears, but he could hear the sobs already.

Oh, Angela...

He started forward again, hoping it wouldn't be too hard to calm her down.

Laura, too, was approaching. She'd gotten back to her own feet, and was wearing a broad, incredulous grin. She'd always been one to bounce back quickly from a fright, and she seemed almost fascinated by Angela's continued hysterics.

“WOW! That was a LOT of birds!” she exclaimed, innocently oblivious to her friend's genuine distress. “You shoulda seen the look on your face!”

Angela didn't seem to hear her. She was still swiping at the now-empty air, eyes shut tight and face screwed up, flinching away from her nonexistent assailants.

The sight was heartbreaking— but as James hurried towards them, he saw something that made his heart stop.

He broke into a sprint.

“LAURA! Laura, stay away, she's not playing!!”

The girl blinked over her shoulder at him in surprise, apparently noticing his presence for the very first time. But she had already raised her arm to touch, to tug on Angela's soiled sweater, and she carried through with it nonetheless. Even though Angela was already whirling to face her.

A flash of sharp silver glinted in the pre-sun light.


The world was a blur of gray, green, and ragged breathing. Repeated squelches of soggy grass. Twin points of pain on his shoulders where two small hands were gripping for dear life.

James had Laura bundled in his arms, and he was running faster than he ever had since leaving Silent Hill, urgency temporarily purging weeks' worth of soreness and exhaustion from his muscles.

It was the first time he had ever carried her anywhere without a struggle— physical touch was just something that didn't happen between them, unless it involved her hitting or kicking him for whatever reason she'd decided was relevant that day.

But he was barely thinking about that, and he could tell that she wasn't either.

Her arms were around his neck, and she was staring over his shoulder with a look of horror that she had not worn since that night in the bar.

“W-what's wrong with Angela, wh-why did she—?!”

Her eyes were on the shrinking figure of their friend behind them. His were on the barn. Or, more accurately, the wall of brambles just beyond it.

“N-no time to explain— just—”


The strike had whistled about an inch over Laura's head, the displaced air making the bright, messy strands of hair that always escaped from her ponytail flutter like long grass in a gust of wind.

James had watched it as though in slow motion, feeling as though a trapdoor to nothingness had opened at the bottom of his body and allowed all his insides to plummet straight down into the void. It had honestly been a complete roll of the dice, whether he'd have frozen in place or been spurred into motion. Sheer chance allowed the adrenaline surging through his veins to launch him forward instead of shut him down, and just as Angela had angled her arm back for another swing, he had ducked in to scoop Laura up and throw her over his shoulder.

It was only as he ran that his brain could even begin to process what it had just seen, and those lost guts returned to his torso cavity, now filled with lead.

He knew exactly where the knife now in Angela's hand had come from, with its little wooden handle and slightly-serrated edge.

He had watched her help Laura cut her food with it.

Perhaps it shouldn't have surprised him.

Perhaps he should have just expected her to take that little bit of insurance with her, just in case her tiny well of growing trust, fed one trickle at a time, turned out to be misplaced.

Perhaps she'd thought she might need it sometime during the night, if James Sunderland turned out to be a liar.

Perhaps he had no right to feel the cruel stab of betrayal gouging at his chest.

But he did anyway.


Lightheaded, James finally stumbled to a halt only after crashing through the bushes lining the forest's edge. He barely even felt the thorns that tore at them both as he did. His breath was coming sharp and fast and his jaw hung slack like a dog's. The sprint from one side of the meadow to the other had taken less than a minute, but his lungs burned like he'd just run a marathon.

Chest heaving, he set Laura down on the ground.

“Stay here.”

“But—”

“Just stay! I'll be right back!”

He had already turned, was forcing his way back out onto open ground and breaking into a run again. There wasn't time to stop and think.

“Angela!!”

The scarecrow-like figure of the young woman was still swaying where they had left it— for all that his instincts had urged him into flight as though she'd been slashing the knife right at his heels the entire way, she hadn't pursued them for even one step. She'd wrapped an arm around herself and was still choking out thick sobs, turning in place and slashing at the air around her.

Not even a feather remained of the flock that had startled her— she was fighting something else.

The blade flashed in her fingers.

James could already feel his knees starting to buckle as he reached her. He staggered to a stop just out of striking radius— he hoped, anyway.

“Angela! It's okay... it's okay, it's okay, there's— there's nothing there, Angela!”

A humming whine rose in her throat like an out-of-tune violin and she lurched, flinging the knife-bearing arm out so wildly that it became a blur, making his heart jitter and skin prickle.

He sucked in a breath through his teeth, which he realized too late were already bared in a grin of pure fear. He hid them quickly. Had to. Couldn't show how threadbare and fraying his grip on the situation was. It would only make things worse than they already were— which, there was no way to deny it, were catastrophically bad.

And god, they'd gotten that way in a matter of seconds.

“Angela, it was— it was only birds... just some birds... it'll be okay, it's gonna be okay...”

If he had just been a fraction slower...

“It's gonna be okay...”

She shook her head furiously, not even looking at him. Even as her body was turning in his direction, she whipped her head away. Sharply left, to the right, even down. Anywhere but at him.

“No. No, no, no,” she mumbled, breathlessly. Her lungs were working in sharp, huffing gasps, making her shoulders twitch and convulse. She was hyperventilating. “No, no, it's NOT OKAY! It's not!!”

James could feel the rims of his eyes starting to sting.

“O-okay! Okay, it's NOT okay, but... but Angela, you... you gotta calm down!”

“NO!” She whirled, brandishing the knife at him— and yes, it was a knife, despite all his hopes that he had somehow been mistaken—and the sick wave of hurt and betrayal washed over him again.

He'd thought they were doing so well.

And yet she'd had that, all this time.

Part of him couldn't fathom how she'd managed to take it with her without being noticed. But really, how much attention had he actually been paying? She'd taken the knife she'd carried through Silent Hill from a restaurant, too.

Her father and brother had deserved to die.

But its use had never been going to stop there, had it.

She'd sounded so disappointed when he told her that he didn't have it anymore...

“Angela...” he said slowly. His voice had started off as steady as could be expected, but now he couldn't hide the shake. “Angela, put the knife down. Please.”

Her knuckles tightened on the handle in response. She'd finally looked up at him, and he could see her face was wet with tears, and her teeth were gritted hard enough to bring out the tendons in her neck like ropes. Her eyes held a desperation he hadn't seen in them since the piston room, when the lumbering, monstrous facsimile of her father had been looming over her.

Her lip was quivering.

“I can't.”

“Yes, you can,” James breathed, trying to sound encouraging with every fiber of his being. “It's gonna be okay. T... the monsters are gone, remember? You said it yourself. They c-can't hurt you now. So... please... just put it down. Please...”

“No,” she choked out, backing away with the knife still held in front of her. The hand bearing it was shaking, too. “Don't... don't you see it? Can't you?”

When all he did was stare at her helplessly, brows folded like bent forks, she shook her head at him again. More tears were coursing down her cheeks now, thick and pearly in the morning light.

“James,” she whispered tearfully, quaking like a leaf, “can't you smell the smoke?”

He'd been breathing hard, this whole time. Too distracted to focus on anything but getting the air in and out. Certainly not what was carried on each breath, which up until this point had only been the ripe, marshy smell of the wild earth.

He opened is mouth to say 'no'.

But then he did.

A deep, wooden scent curled up into his nostrils— like someone was burning leaves and twigs nearby. But there were no fires in this damp, summer-soaked field.

“... N-no,” he finally stammered.

But she had already seen the answer in his eyes.

“See!” she hissed through her teeth, the knife shaking. She was holding it with both hands now, knuckles as tight and white as the teeth she bared. “You were wrong! We were both wrong— there's no escape! Not for us. It comes back! It always comes back!”

The stinging in his eyes had turned to open watering. Had it been tears before? Or had the smoke been getting to them before he even knew it was there? Was that why his lungs had been burning?

No— no, there was no smoke.

So why could he smell it?

Why could he smell it?

—NO.

No, this had to stop. He had to stop.

The bed in the hotel room hadn't grown legs and an appetite for flesh.

The scream in the woods had not been a monster.

And there was no god damn fire in this field.

James took his voice in both proverbial hands and forced it to steady. Then he spread his real ones, and pleaded.

“Angela... I'm telling the truth. I... I don't know how to fix everything. If I did, I— so many things would be different if I did. But I do— I do know that you gotta put the knife down. Just... put it down. You handed it to me once before... remember? Back there, in the town. H— … how hard was that?”

To his immeasurable relief, he saw Angela's quaking shoulders begin to still. Maybe she could sense his sincerity, maybe not, but her arms lowered, ever so slightly. James's mouth pulled into a shaky, hopeful smile.

“Yeah, that's it! You can do it. I know you can! Just... just hand it to me, nice and slow...”

Lip still trembling, Angela looked down at the knife... then slowly extended her arm forward in offering.

James forgot himself, and reached out to take it.

Angela screamed.

A bright, searing pain opened up across his brow.


James found himself staggering backwards in shock. Something hot trickled down into his eye. It stung worse than the smoke. He brought a trembling hand to his forehead, and it came away painted a deep red that he hadn't seen in months.

He stared at it in dumb disbelief.

“... You... you cut me...”

She had screamed at him and hurled epithets, she had shaken aggressive fists and smacked his hands away, but she had never actually attacked him. Not even with the knife that had taken her family's lives.

Not until now.

Folding in on herself, she shrank away, but even the apologies that would normally come bubbling out of her mouth like fountain water were long gone. Her eyes gleamed in directionless terror and the knife, its stainless steel now reddened with the vital fluids of a human being just like her last one, was clutched in fingers as pale and tight as ever.

“No... no... no podemos escapar..” she moaned, low and agonized. “It's too late for us...”

“You cut me,” repeated James stupidly. He could feel the blood dribbling down his cheek. The green of the field had begun to blot over in crimson as it welled in his lower eyelid.

“Can't you see?!” cried Angela despairingly. She had paused from her swaying and turning, that wild-tiger pacing, and was now standing in front of them with her shaking arms spread almost beseechingly, the bloodied knife pointing up at the sky. “There's no ESCAPE! James, can't you see it? CAN'T YOU UNDERSTAND?! Estamos en el INFIERNO!”

And then she looked past him, staring straight over his shoulder, and the last remaining color drained from her face even as the light— a hot, sanguine light— washed over it. Her eyes went wide, her face contorted in sheer terror at whatever it was she beheld. She brought the knife up again, this time to point. And then she screamed.

She screamed and screamed.

At any other moment, he would have turned to see what could possibly have been there, to drag a sound like that out of another human being.

But he couldn't.

Because at that very moment, with his eyes clouded by blood and palm painted with the same, the first rays of sunlight crept through the trees behind him. They cast a dazzling, blazing reflection on the windows of the house that they hadn't noticed last night.

And they were red.

“... Ah... ah... a-ah...” James croaked.

Tendrils of smoke crept upwards from the earth all around them, the morning dew hissing as it sizzled out of existence. The lush tangles of vegetation all around them began to brown and wither, sinking to the ground in silence. Their death was eerily fast and had no fanfare save for the pounding of his own heart.

“Do you see it? You see it, don't you?! YOU SEE IT! YOU SEE IT,” wailed Angela.

The fiery light framed her like an infernal halo, and its flow through the trees seemed to flicker. The sun had been rising behind him seconds ago, but it had somehow melted down and crept along the horizon in each direction until it surrounded them like a ring. Leaves snapped and crackled. They had to be burning.

James's weakened legs carried him backwards a few steps. He had lifted his hand in front of him, to shield his reddened and watering eyes from the light— but the thick scarlet coating on his fingers seemed to blare even harder than the horrible glow, which was stretching out across the field now, in terrible red tendrils that crept through the dead grass like veins.

The thumping of his heart grew louder and louder, until each beat seemed to thunder through the ground, vibrating the scorched earth under his feet. His brain knew it was just in his chest, that it was just the mundane, fist-sized muscle that fed blood to the rest of him and was currently pushing it out of him in miniature rivers that flowed into his mouth and off of his chin, that its pounding was nothing more than evidence of the body's continuous fight against the stillness of death.

But his head, as suddenly and surely as a siren wailing, knew that it was something different.

The thumping belonged to a pair of big red boots.

They were miles away, but they were turned in his direction.

And they were coming.

“Aaaah... ahaa-aahh... haah... haaaAAAAAH! AAAAAAAUH!”

A second scream had joined Angela's, and that scream was coming from him.

Because now he saw it. Straight through the back of his own skull, like the after-image of the veins in your eyes after seeing a bright flash of light head-on, impossibly far away but still close enough to touch: a helmet of strange and eldritch construction— triangular, enormous, and red as the blood that was pouring from his head. And silhouetted against the light, a long instrument that tapered into a wickedly-sharp point, held in a hand that was as mighty and unmovable as a padlock.

The howl of sirens exploded into his ears, and the crawling streaks of red flowed out of the trees and into his eyes until they were all he could see.


James hit the ground before he even knew he was falling.

He'd landed at Angela's feet— she was screaming and thrashing at the air again, knife flashing vermilion as she slashed it wildly at shadowy shapes that eluded clear definition. Pain exploded through his senses as she trampled straight over him in the process— not purposefully, but he may as well not have been there at all. She was busy, and he could no longer tell if her fight was against something imaginary or very, very real.

For a few seconds, all he could do was writhe there in the dead brush, entire body convulsing with every deafening step of those far-off feet.

The red came in again, so thickly that it went black.


And then it was gone.

Green grass and wet soil came up under his fingers as he clawed at it.

It was only when his vision cleared entirely that he even realized he was moving— that he had somehow made it to his hands and knees and was now crawling desperately across the field— a field somehow returned to life after withering before his very eyes only seconds before.

The smoke and bloody red sunlight had faded— but he could still feel the blood splattering off his face, still hear the sirens and Angela's hoarse shrieks behind him. The sound struck a note of frantic terror— not as delirious as what the terrible, deafening marching had elicited, but still primal, instinctive— into him, and he tried to rise several times, only to come smacking back down to the earth with every attempt.

He couldn't do it, and after getting a mouthful of mud and grass, he gave up entirely, conceding to drag himself on shaking arms. The siren whooped loudly behind him, making him wheeze and scramble even harder. Somehow he covered the entire length of the field like that, clambering on all fours like an animal until he had finally reached the blessedly-dark shelter of the brambles.

And that was where he collapsed, entire body quaking with the effort not to pass out on the spot.

His head had no sooner hit the cool, moist earth than Laura was already hunkered over him, blotting out the morning light— light that was pale once more, like it had been when he'd walked out of the barn no more than fifteen minutes ago.

“James? JAMES?! What's happening? What's happening?! James, GET UP!!”

Her voice was high and shrill, but also hushed. For the first time he'd ever seen her this distressed, she was too afraid to raise it.

Still twitching as though fighting off the last tremors of a seizure, James's eyes rolled in his head to look up at her. He tried to say something in reply, but all that came out was a croak. Lights were flashing in the corners of his vision and some detached part of him wondered if he was having a stroke.

Her shadow then left him as abruptly as it had appeared— she'd scooted away and was now peering out of the bushes.

“What's wrong with Angela? What's WRONG with her?!” she hissed, plainly horrified. “What is she doing?! Why are there police?!”

Police? James thought weakly.

Still feeling the blinding sting of the cut on his forehead, he slowly lifted his neck— then his torso, pulling a sore and stomped-on arm underneath him to push himself up and peer out through the leaves of the bush.

Cold reality came rushing back as he realized where the flashing in his vision had come from.

Rolling down the dirt road were three police cruisers, sirens blatting to announce themselves. The lights on their backs rolled in glowing circles, alternating blue and red— a much-cooler red than the hot, hellish one that had overtaken the field moments earlier.

Back across the meadow, Angela's sob-wracked form was still flailing and slicing at the empty air around her.

She was alone.

“H... how...” James gasped out, staring at the scene he had just fled. He could barely believe it was the same meadow that he'd watched die all around him, the life baked right out of it by those horrible threads of scarlet that spread through it like an infection.

It was too late to go back out there now. Every molecule in his body knew that as certainly as he had known that his heartbeat matched, pound for stomp, the march of an executioner's feet across a stony forest floor.

But that didn't stop him from wanting to howl out a warning as uniformed policemen emerged from the cars, weapons not yet drawn but still visible at their hips. Would the warning be for Angela? For the police? Not even James could quite decide the answer to that. At first, he couldn't even comprehend why the police were here. What were they doing? How had they even known?

Painfully, he turned his head back to Angela for answers, and through the trees he saw it again and understood. That house, nestled into the woods so cozily that they'd missed it in the dark.

He knew what must have happened now.

Someone in that house had heard them— maybe even just noticed that there were three strangers in the field— and called the cops. Maybe it was some crotchety old farmer and there had been private property signs they'd walked past in the night just like they had the house.

Or maybe the caller had just heard two people screaming in the backyard at the crack of dawn, seen that one of them had a knife, and done what any sane person would do.

It didn't matter now.

“Angela...” he murmured wretchedly, bringing his trembling hands up to clench around the branches of the bush. They may as well have been iron bars.

The police were already crossing the field towards her. When they'd first exited the cars, they'd been bristling, ready to break up a fight or worse. But when they saw the lone young woman pacing back and forth by the trees' edge, several of them had relaxed. Their approaching gait went from aggressive to easy. Switching gears.

She barely seemed to notice them at first.

When she did, she too exhibited a shift— the screaming stopped, as did the thrashing. But she still paced, the knife held up to her temple as though its coolness was calming a fever. Her shrieks had turned into frantic, harried mumbling that James couldn't understand from across the field.

She did not brandish the knife at them, even as they fanned out around her, speaking what were probably calming words. Instead, she shook her head wildly, pushing away from them and walking in agitated circles until finally, one was able to strike out and knock the knife from her hands, allowing two others to grab hold of her arms.

She went down, her cries of “NO! NO! VETE! DÉJAME EN PAZ!” cutting off with her head hit the earth.

That was when the screaming came back; wordless, anguished wails pierced by sobbing.

James could only watch, a crushing weight closing around his chest.

“... James...” Laura asked quaveringly, down on her knees beside him. She had watched it all unfold from the thicket, and now her voice was a whisper. “What's gonna happen to her?”

He didn't answer.

He couldn't.

He could barely tear his eyes away.

The heat rolled over him in deep, rumbling waves as he stood at the bottom of the staircase. His ears were full to the brim with sound, with the dying crackle of wood and deafening roar of the flames, pressing in from all sides. The thick stench of rot and mildew that had filled Lakeview Hotel's soggy, flooded rooms had been replaced by air choked with hot ash.

He had stepped from his own world of dripping water and swirling mist and into Angela's inferno.

In the middle of it all, she stood. She was halfway up the staircase, arms loosely wrapped around herself as she regarded a pair of hanging canvasses that bulged grotesquely at the bottom, dripping red. Even the blinding brightness of the flames couldn't burn away the dark shroud of melancholy hanging over her. If anything, it was darker than ever.

James breathed in deeply, ignoring how the air scorched on its way down, and stepped forward. His boots thunked dully on the wooden steps as he climbed towards her.

She turned at the sound— somehow she'd picked it up, even through the deafening blaze.

For once, it was delight that lit up her face at the sight of him.

“... Mama!” she exclaimed. Turning away from the morbid gallery, she clattered down the steps towards him, making him step back despite himself, some inner instinct begging him to pull away even as the rest of him longed to meet her approach with a comforting hand. “Mama, I've been looking for you! You're the only one left. Maybe then... maybe then I can rest.”

When he continued to back away, her expression turned distressed, brows peaking upwards.

“Mama... why are you running away?”

She reached out, too quickly for him to continue sinking backwards, and clasped his face in her hands. The tender, elated smile had returned... but only for a second. As she felt his cold, wet cheeks and ran a hand over his shoulders, her expression turned confused. Then crestfallen.

She gasped and pulled away, one hand to her chest.

“Y... you're not my mama!”

A male officer had been holding her down as she struggled and pleaded, but when the rough hands patting her down for other, hidden weapons elicited a scream in plain English, “PLEASE! DON'T! I'LL BE GOOD!”, a brown-haired female cop with a ponytail moved in like a flash to order him away.

She bent to console the openly-sobbing Angela, who upon being released had immediately curled into a ball, clutching her head. After a moment, she said something else to one of the male officers, one of whom returned to the squad cars. James could see him pulling what looked like a blanket from the backseat.

It was only then that James let himself sag back down, the breath he'd been holding escaping him in a shaky sob of his own.

Guilt swelled up inside him, washing up in his throat like bile as he shook his head and lifted a hand, forcing his legs to climb the stairs again. But he couldn't bring himself to speak. He wasn't who she was looking for.

She backed further up the stairs, turning away and bringing her hands to her eyes. Her voice broke as it came out, not strong enough to hold the emotion behind her words. “I... I'm sorry...”

In the brief time they'd known each other, that single phrase had comprised most of their interactions. It always tugged at his heartstrings, but now it sent a veritable javelin of sorrow through him.

Unable to help himself, he reached out, fingers barely brushing the woolen fabric of her sleeves.

She didn't deserve to be so sorry all the time.

“Angela, no...”

They wouldn't hurt her. At least not right here, not right now.

But the thought was no relief. The unbearable tightness in his chest remained, even as the policewoman helped Angela up. She tottered to her feet like a newborn fawn, her skin paper-white. She looked so fragile in the small sea of dark uniforms; like a strong gust of wind wouldn't just knock her over, but tear her in half.

She didn't struggle as the handcuffs went on— just bowed her head, mouth screwing up and charcoal hair falling across her red-rimmed eyes.

For once, she didn't shriek or cringe away at the touch— instead she simply didn't respond at all, turning to stare back into the fire. It danced across her dark eyes, but somehow failed to penetrate deeper shadows behind them. James reluctantly let his arm fall to his side once more. For a moment, they merely faced each other: him staring up, and her gazing down.

Then, a sniff rising in her throat, she waved a hand and brought the other to her eyes once more.

“... Thank you... for saving me,” she said at last. Her voice was heavy. “... But I wish you hadn't.”

Tears glittering in her eyes, she spread her arms and gestured helplessly to herself, shaking her head.

“Even Mama said it. I deserved what happened.”

“No, Angela, that's wrong!” James insisted. Why wouldn't— why couldn't she believe him?

The policewoman was saying something to her that didn't carry across the field well enough to hear— pointing to the trail of disturbed, blood-dotted underbrush that James had left behind in his wake, and then to the knife, which had been collected from where it had fallen and was now being slipped into a plastic bag by one of the other officers.

Angela's only reply was tight-lipped silence and a shake of the head, even when the policewoman pointed out at the treeline, only slightly off from where James and Laura crouched, watching. All she did was stare ahead, eyes dull in defeat.

For a second, staring down at him, at his earnestly-creased brow, her expression was unfathomably sad. Perhaps she was puzzling over how, why he could possibly be trying so hard to convince her of something she just couldn't accept. Then she closed her eyes and turned away again, lifting her hands in a conciliatory manner so ironically reminiscent of the way he so often tried to placate her when she panicked or burst out in anger.

“No... don't pity me.” The arms returned to wrap around her and she pressed her knuckles to her cheek, watching the flames spread slowly across the ceiling. “... I'm not worth it.”

The fire breathed in and out around them restlessly, like an animal— as alive as the town itself. It was hungry, impatient... and yet it touched neither of them. Just blew, its hot breath caressing them like so many dry, cracked tongues.

… Then, Angela turned her head back to face him.

Instead of the pain that had been there moments before, her eyes had turned bright and sharp as flint.

“... Or maybe,” she breathed, a cruel sneer now in her voice, “... you think you can save me.”

She pressed a hand to her chest, and now it was delicate, mocking.

“Will you love me? Take care of me?”

Rolling her eyes up, she spread her arms to gesture to the tunnel of fire all around them. Her words were sharpened to hooks at the ends, tailored to tear at the last bits of flesh on his already picked-over soul, and they both knew it.

“Heal all my pain?”

She stared down at him then, flint-and-tinder eyes burning harder than even the ancient wooden walls. His throat tightened, and he looked down.

He hadn't been able to heal or take care of Mary.

There had been times he hadn't even been able to love her.

Cold waters rising through his chest despite the hear, he backed another step down, head bowed.

“... Hmm,” Angela said bitterly. Eyes lidded, she turned away from him to look back at the canvasses— the bulge of the hanging body, the arms and legs splayed like a skin. Brown old blood pooled where the legs split. “That's what I thought.”

James's eyes stung. He couldn't bring them back up to Angela's no matter how hard he tried. So he let them hang along with his head as shame welled up within them and began to drip down to the charred wood at his feet. It hissed where it fell.

“... James.”

Only when prompted by his own name could he lift his eyes back up, and he found them pierced once more by her stare, so hard that the heat of it dried their tears in an instant.

Slowly, she held out her hand. The words she parted with next were cold and sure.

“Give me back that knife.”

The police were spreading across the field, picking through the grass. But not towards him and Laura.

Some had gone up to the house. Others were poking around in the bushes where birds that started the entire incident had been roosting. A couple more had gone into the barn and then come back out, shaking their heads. No sign of any other party, they were saying. A few days ago, James would barely have been able to believe that they hadn't seen the gas can, or the too-big-for-one-person flattened spot in the hay.

But after what had just happened, he barely had room in his brain to question it at all. He didn't even want to. Part of him wanted to be shot dead on the spot.

He blinked, struck numb by the request. Then he shook his head. Barely a jiggle at first... but then more firmly.

“... No.” The word almost surprised him— it felt dusty and stiff leaving his jaws. Refusing a direct request for something— anything— just wasn't something that James did. But how could he say 'yes' to that? “I... I won't.”

She also looked surprised, at first.

Then her eyes flashed like knives themselves, and she brought her hands to her hips and asked, darkly, “Saving it for yourself?”

She'd spoken calmly, like there was nothing remarkable about it... but the words hit him like a load of bricks and he brought his own hand to his chest, astonished.

“M... me? … N... no. I'd never kill myself...”

But she had already started to turn away in disgust, a crumpled sneer tugging on her mouth. She wasn't going to waste any more time on James Sunderland, the liar, the hypocrite.

The brown-haired cop had been speaking fervently with her fellow officers for several minutes. But the one returning from the house with a shrug and a shaken head seemed to bring an end to whatever discussion it was they were having.

So she turned instead to Angela, who'd been standing numbly with the blanket draped over her shoulders like a sad little cape, and laid a hand on her shoulders.

At the very least, it was calmly that she seemed to murmur into the young woman's ear, and gently that she steered her around and began to lead her across the field to the trio of cars waiting on the road.

With slowness and deliberation that filled her every step like molten iron, Angela began to climb the stairs. The verbal hooks she'd left embedded in him pulled and tore, but as the flames filled the space between them, he knew he couldn't follow her.

So he watched helplessly, the sweat rolling down his brow. He wiped at it with a leaden hand, and then said, mournfully, “... It's hot as hell in here.”

Her gaze had been on her shoes from the moment she'd stood back up, and stayed down in the grass all the way to the car.

It wasn't until she made it there, the female officer's hand still on her arm as she was coaxed into the open backseat, that she finally turned her head and looked back at him— at them both— over her shoulder.

She couldn't possibly have seen them through the bushes, or even known for sure that they were still there, that they hadn't fled entirely.

But somehow, her eyes met James's anyway.

Her silhouette in the flames cocked its head with a sort of sad curiosity.

“You see it, too?”

When he nodded, a tiny and timid motion, she sighed.

“... For me... it's always like this.”

There wasn't a snowflake's chance in Hell that he could hear what she was saying when her lips moved. But he knew anyway, because he'd seen her say the same words countless times.

I'm sorry.

The door of the car closed with a clunk, and Angela disappeared from view entirely.

Just as she had resumed her ascent and vanished into the fire before her very eyes, back in that burning staircase on the lake.

“... I'm sorry,” James said. It was a whisper at first. But as the squad cars slowly pulled off the shoulder of the road and circled in a broad 'U' shape, his voice rose to a honk— a broken, squawky yell. “I'm sorry! Angela, I'm so sorry!!”

His apologies, too soft and too late and too far away, did nothing to slow the tail-lights as they grew smaller and smaller.

~*~

The cars had been gone for nearly half an hour.

Silence had kept its hold on the meadow for only a few minutes once the hum of the cruisers' engines had faded into the distance-- then birdsong and rustling leaves had reclaimed the woodlands, resuming as though nothing had happened at all. The sun was up proper now, albeit behind an overcast wall of clouds, and the forest brightened and dimmed as said clouds crept slowly overhead, ambivalent to all that had unfolded below them.

James ignored all of it.

The breeze, the birds, even the approaching footsteps.

A dirty, familiar pair of sneakers came into view, their owner standing expectantly in the grass in front of him. But he didn't raise his eyes to meet the rest of her, even when she put her hands on her hips and said, emphatically, “James.”

He said nothing.

He hadn't moved an inch since the last of the flashing lights disappeared up the road. Still nestled in the shelter of the bushes, he had slumped back against the nearest tree-trunk and simply remained that way, staring at the ground between his fingers in total silence.

“... James,” Laura repeated, and reached out with one foot to give his leg a kick. It wound up being more of a tap. The way someone touched something to see if it was dead or not.

Finally, reluctantly, he let his hands fall from his face and let out a deep, shivering sigh. But his chin was still pressed to his chest, his gaze still down at where his own blood had decorated the earth. He couldn't look at her.

“... James, the police people are gone. We can come out,” Laura pointed out after an impatient pause. But there was a strange softness to her voice.

It wasn't kind, or even really gentle.

But it was different from her usual brazen disregard for anything resembling common courtesy.

Whatever it was, he knew she still wouldn't be content to take his continuing silence for an answer. So...

“... She's gone,” he mumbled at last.

Lifting his hand, he unfurled his fingers and regarded the rusty patch on his palm with sore, unfocused eyes.

The cut on his forehead had finally stopped bleeding— he'd staunched the flow with a handful of dry grass, not caring about the dirt still clumped at the roots or the fact that he'd been pressing hard enough to leave a bruise. He could still feel it drying on his face, and clinging stickily to his lips. He wondered if he'd ever taste something other than copper again.

“... Yeah,” Laura said, that strange mingled note of impatience and attempted compassion in her voice. Like she couldn't believe how long it was taking for it all to sink through his thick skull, but dammit, she was trying real hard to get him up to speed. “The police people took her away. Because she was screaming and waving a knife around. Did you know she had that? Cuz I didn't. She was goin' crazy. And...”

She'd clearly been going somewhere with that, but tellingly, she shut her mouth there.

Even though he was still barely looking at her, he could tell that they were thinking the same thing: that he had been going crazy right alongside her.

The only difference between them had been the knife.

He swallowed, with no small amount of difficulty. The lump in his throat had been growing like a tumor and it wasn't about to go down without a fight.

What must it have looked like to Laura— watching as the two adults who'd been looking after her seemingly descended into total madness? What must she have thought, watching James wallow uselessly on the ground like a wounded animal and scream at absolutely nothing?

And what must be going through Angela's head, all alone in the back of that car and growing further away with every second?

He could have stopped this.

He could have, if only he'd been just a little better.

Just a little stronger.

They'd been doing so well.

“... I couldn't help her,” he muttered. “I couldn't... I sh-.... I shoulda. Should have. Should've been able to stop it. Stop them from...”

“... Well, you tried, didn't you?” Laura snapped, patience finally wearing thin. “You tried. You coulda just let her go crazy by herself. You coulda just watched.”

“That's not enough,” he croaked, voice tight. His mouth had started to stretch into a taut grin of pain, and he could feel the dried blood crackling at its corners. “It wasn't enough. She wasn't c-crazy, she was scared and I sh-... s-should have helped her. I should've stopped it from happening. This was my fault... this was... all my fault...”

“She cut your face, James.” Laura's hands were on her hips, and she was glaring at him now, lip turned out. “She cut you and then when you were bleeding everywhere she stepped on you and then the police people came. If someone cut me and I was bleeding everywhere and got stepped on and then cops showed up, I would run away too. You tried. So what's the problem?”

He shook his head back and forth slowly, rolling it from shoulder to shoulder. It wasn't that her words didn't make sense. They did. He knew they did. Hell, the fact that she made a confession to him or likened her own theoretical actions to his in any way was downright remarkable. But the memory of Angela's terror was just too powerful. And the flood running through his head of things he should have done was like a river of molasses, thick and heavy and impossible to escape.

He should have let her put the knife down on the ground instead of trying to take it from her. He should have told her how much he had ahead of her. He should have told her that they were free of that town no matter how much smoke rose from the grass or how hard the marching thundered in his ears. He should have ignored what his stupid, broken brain was telling him and been calm, for her.

He should have lied.

Because maybe if he lied hard enough, the lies could have been real.

But he didn't, and now he was sitting filthy and wretched in the woods, his friend was gone, their brief bubble of safety and recovery had burst, and it was all his fault.

A shuddering gasp wracked his shoulders and he clutched his hands to his face again, sagging further down against his tree.

There was a long silence from Laura. Then she turned without a word and padded off through the bushes again, out into the field.

This time it wasn't long before they returned.

“James, we gotta go. Get up,” she commanded. When he peered out at her through his fingers, she was standing before him again. In her arms were the two flashlights, the duffel bag, and the little gas canister. As soon as she saw that she had his attention, she stepped over and began to stuff the smaller flashlight into one of his coat-pockets. “Stop crying.”

Stunned but compliant, James got slowly to his feet despite the throb of his joints and the cut on his head.

“Gimme your hand,” Laura demanded. When he dopily raised his left hand, the one covered in dried blood, she wrinkled her nose and gave him a dirty look. “No, that one's gross. The other hand.”

He lifted the right one instead and she snatched it immediately. Without another word, she turned and marched straight out of the bushes, leading him like an elephant by the trunk. He found himself following her in an automatic, obedient shamble. It was surprisingly easy— with Laura leading, he didn't have to think.

She took him through the field and back towards the barn, which now looked emptier than it ever had before.

Pausing by the door, she looked back at him thoughtfully before saying, “You should wash your face. You look like Roadkill Panda again.”

The old insult brought— in spite of everything— a low, wheezy laugh rising from his throat.

“... Y-... yeah... I guess...”

Among the hutches and other abandoned debris clustered around the barn, he spotted an old rain barrel. It was rusted right through with age, but there was a lid on top where a small pool of last night's rain remained. Even the hint of rust that came with it when he splashed it on his face was a welcome reprieve from the lingering taste of blood and regret.

Once his face was clean and the ripples dispersed, James regarded his reflection for a moment in the still, dark surface of the water. Even without the blood staining his skin, the rust underneath painted his visage a murky red.

The barrel lid wasn't a square.

But even so, James knew he would never, ever forget this little meadow and what had happened in it.


Several yards away, Laura turned and spread her arms impatiently. She had let go of him and scurried over to the road.

“Come on!”

Wiping his forehead off on his sleeve, James plodded after her. The ground under his boots turned from spongey green earth to the hard, wet mud they'd be walking for most of the foreseeable future.

Upon reaching her, Laura shoved the gas can at him unceremoniously.

“I don't wanna carry this! You take it.”

He tucked it under one arm and took a deep breath before beginning to walk.

For the first few minutes, she watched him dubiously. But then, apparently confident that he didn't need to be led any longer, she skipped ahead and scrambled onto a rock wall at the side of the road, where she began to walk with her arms held out on either side of her for balance.

“Will Angela be okay?” she asked loudly, watching where she was stepping rather than looking over her shoulder at him.

“... I don't know. … I... I hope so...”

“... I think she'll be okay,” she declared after a second's thought. “She didn't really do anything. She cut you, but it was an accident and you didn't die. One time I got a cut because Sammy at the orphanage pushed me down, and he just went to bed without dinner. And he did it on purpose!”

Her voice was aggressively chipper, as though daring him to disagree. Maybe she knew how naiive her words were, maybe she didn't— either way, James was reminded, sharply and painfully, of the way she spoke of Eddie. Of Mary.

To most people, it would seem callous; the way Laura took losses so sudden and dramatic in stride.

But, well.

They both had their ways of coping, didn't they.

“Come on, slowpoke! We'll never get back to the car at this rate.”

She began to hum as she walked, and his throat grew thick at the sound as he watched her totter ahead of him along the lumpy, mismatched stones... thinking about Angela, all alone with a blanket and hurtling towards an unknown destination where he couldn't possibly hope to reach her. Envying how Laura could throw down the weights on her shoulders and move on, how that much determination to survive could be packed into that one little body. Dreading the long walk ahead of them both.

But his pulse thudded distantly in his ears, a grim reminder of what he had seen in his mind's eye. His feet might be sore, sad, and leaden. But they still had to outwalk that distant march.

James swallowed hard, and picked up his pace.

“Wait up... I'm coming.”


END BOOK 1