WRITING: Gravity (Chapter 8)

[phantastus]

Title: GRAVITY
Chapter: 8 (Fogbound)
Author: phantastus
Fandom: Silent Hill
Rating: PG
Genre: Horror/Drama
Main characters: James Sunderland, Laura
Summary: After several weeks on the move, James and Laura hit an unexpected snag. For Laura, it's a bump in the road. For James, it's a chilling wake-up call.
Notes: Chapter 8 of my ongoing, obscenely long SH2 fanfic. Set directly after the Leave Ending, but contains heavy implications of In Water. The fic is mirrored over here along with several subsequent chapters, but I will be posting the most up-to-date edits here for the time being. Also, I think these content warnings are getting progressively stupider with each passing chapter.
This story was initially written (and is still in progress) for NaNoWriMo 2009.
Disclaimer/Warnings: In keeping with the source material, this fanfic depicts events and situations that may be considered violent or cruel. If anything in the Silent Hill series triggers you, this story may not be for you. This chapter deals with potentially-upsetting concepts including but not limited to:

-general horror concepts
-disgusting processed food
-flagrant disregard for road safety
-James being a giant weenie
-spooky dream imagery
-BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES

Please read at your own risk.

Recommended Listening:
-Take it Easy
-Now You Can Sleep
-The Walls Are Listening
-Even Deeper



Chapter 8: Fogbound



The next few weeks passed as quickly as the blacktop under their wheels and as blurrily as the passing landscape.

It was strange, for the days to be going by at such a dizzying rate. James had gotten used to feeling his life crawl by in agonizing slowness. Even in that dreamy haze that had flowed through Silent Hill, each passing moment had a certain sluggish quality, as though time was wading through molasses.

But strange or not, it was what it was: miles of urban sprawl stretching outwards on both sides of the road, buildings and gas stations and endless parking lots that fell away from their view within moments, all eaten up by tall trees and sharp rock faces that rose up and fell down like waves on the side of the highway.

Motels, a new one each night (though they all looked the same after awhile) had become James's refuge of choice once the sun went down and he could drive no longer. He could not remember ever sleeping more soundly than he did in those beds during those first few weeks, even though they were nothing like home.

Mornings were spent crammed into tight little diner booths, both of them wearing heavy faces and stifled yawns. Laura always had a tall glass of orange juice (pulpless, because, as she reminded James every morning when he ordered for her, pulp was like orange guts and that was gross) while James nursed a mug of bitter coffee in one hand to chase away the leaden feeling under his eyes. With a plate or two of scrambled eggs and cooked tomato slices on the table between them, they wold pore over a map (a real one) while Laura was still too sleepy to be overly aggravated at him. She'd break out her markers and together, every morning, they pieced out where next to go.

Sometimes he let her choose altogether. And why not? He had no real destination in mind. A child's course was as good as any— perhaps better. It wasn't as though James had done much good for himself when he'd been charting his own for the past three years.

Before long, the map was covered in bleeding, brightly-coloed spots from Laura's favorite method of trail-blazing. The miniature navigator would close her eyes and slam the tip of an uncapped marker down onto the paper at random, then open them to see where it had landed. The process had to be repeated often, since it tended to result in unreachable locations like a forest or the middle of a lake. Still, it hadn't hurt so far, and by the time the sky darkened each day, they'd either wound up closer or further from their starting point— James didn't keep track. As long as they were moving, he was content to go wherever the marker's dots took them.

It was the closest he had felt to being free in three years.

The further they got from familiar ground, the more dreamlike Silent Hill seemed. He didn't for a moment doubt that it had happened, obviously— but it was easier to put out of his mind as he watched the telephone wires flow by, undulating up and down with every pole. Every so often something would set off a vivid burst of recollection of something or someone from that town, or even just bring the vision of that gray house they'd left behind to his mind's eye, and that hurt. But when it happened, he just focused his eyes on the road ahead and eventually, the twinging ache would fade.

It was not until almost four weeks after they'd first left that junky old parking lot behind Vick's Bar and Diner together that they hit their first metaphorical roadblock on their journey to somewhere.

The sky overhead was gray and overcast that afternoon when James pulled into a gas station— the sort of sky that promised rain and perhaps the first few rumbles of summer thunder, but always seemed to blow on its way before the downpour began. Of course, it seemed to be gray and overcast every time James had bothered to check it for weeks, but that was a New England springtime for you. Re-emerging from the dry, too-early air conditioning of the little mini-mart, James felt the moisture in the air cling to him like sweat. He swiped at his brow with the hand holding onto the spoils of his trip inside, letting the cold Coke bottle press against his cheek briefly before dropping his arm again and heading back towards the car.

The smell of gasoline had always been something James liked— especially back during his teenage years when the mere act of filling his own car's tank up had given him that grand sense of accomplishment. Unfortunately, Laura disagreed with him very strongly on this point, and insisted that all the windows be firmly rolled up whenever they stopped at a station, under the threat of holding her breath indefinitely until he complied.

When pulling on the door handle was met with nothing more than a dull clunk, James groaned and rapped his knuckles on the closed window.

Laura's pale, frowning face popped into view immediately, shaking her head in response to James's exasperated 'Open up!' gestures.

"Come on!" he said, in a tone slightly more pleading than it was annoyed. The first time this had happened, he'd been very annoyed. But it had become routine, like everything else.

When she shook her head again, he sighed and rummaged in the bag for a moment, before pulling out the plastic-wrapped package she was waiting for and flashing its cute, stylized dog logo against the window like a police officer requesting entry with their badge. Laura leaned forward to scrutinize the package carefuly, while James merely took a deep breath and rocked back on his heels, rolling his eyes upward and waiting for his passenger to decide she was satisfied with the legitimacy of his purchase. Finally, she popped the lock on the door and shuffled backwards into her own seat as he got in.

"Is this gonna be the deal every time we pull into a gas station?" he said, easing into the seat and shutting the door behind him.

"I was just making sure you got 'em for real and weren't just trying to trick me," Laura retorted as she snatched the package and flopped back against her seat, eagerly tearing the plastic off.

"Why would I do that?"

"You already did. That one time."

"Laura, I said I was sorry. I figured there wasn't much difference between Twinkies and corny-cakes—"

"Corgi-Cakes," Laura corrected, pulling one of the sticky orange snack-cakes out of the wrapper. "And there is a difference between them and Twinkies. A big difference."

"Yeah, I know that now..." James mumbled, starting the car and slowly pulling out of the lot and onto the pine-lined road. He had made the mistake of sampling one once while Laura was not looking, and had been unpleasantly surprised by what was apparently someone getting the bright idea to turn orange-flavored Children's Motrin into a spongecake and filling it with cream. He had also been unpleasantly surprised when Laura took his cake-theft as a personal affront and delivered swift retribution in the form of a hard-tipped shoe attack on his ankle.

It was safe to say that neither of them, as rough, sap-crusted tree trunks rushed past the windows like marathon runners, expected a snag in their loose plans.

It started innocuously enough.

After roughly twenty minutes on the road, Laura looked up idly from her snack, jaws still working on finishing the first of the two cakes in the packet.

Then she grew very still.

She swallowed what was in her mouth.

And then screamed at the top of her lungs.

James swerved.

"What? WHAT?!" he exclaimed in a panic, trying to steady the car again as someone behind them blared their horn. He had almost gone straight into the other lane. It was hard to look at the road ahead AND look at Laura to make sure she wasn't dying, but god help him, he tried.

She had pressed herself back against the seat like an escaped convict caught in a spotlight, and her gaze (wide, shiny, and blue enough to have been reflecting the sky) fixed firmly on the ceiling of the car. Her teeth were gritted in a wide grimace of fear.

"A BEE! THERE'S A BEE IN HERE!"

"Wha—?!"

"A BEE!"

Rather than pointing towards the object of her fear, she opted instead for kicking one leg upwards to indicate the direction where James should look, and reiterated one last time: "A BEE!"

He looked up.

Sure enough, a hovering little blur of yellow, black, and anger was wavering back and forth up where the thin fabric coating the ceiling had started to come unglued in saggy oval patches. Occasionally it would land and cling with its spindly legs, only to drop back off and go back to buzzing indecisively.

Although it was hovering in one place, its zigzagging motions emanated pure rage.

It was not, as a matter of fact, a bee.

Bees, being herbivorous and far more interested in minding their own flower pollinating, honeycomb-building business than in losing their guts in the flesh of random passersby, are rather peaceful and not entirely deserving of the stigma attached to them by more or less every human being in the world. James and Laura were no exception to this common fear.

If it had been a bee, it would have gained a similar reaction from them both, but fortunately would not have otherwise been a problem.

This was not the case.

The warning-colored insect by the ceiling was a wasp.

Bees don't get angry until you invade their space. Wasps, on the other hand, seem to just be angry about the fact that they're wasps.

James had been on the receiving end of enough wasp stings to already be familiar with this knowledge.

"AH! Uh— okay. OKAY. Just— stay calm, Laura—um—!"

Leaning away from Laura's side of the car, James turned his head back and forth repeatedly between the twisty road in front of them, the still-shrieking eight-year-old in the passenger seat, and the time-bomb buzzing by the ceiling, and tried to remain calm. The steering wheel in front of him, with its nice, simple circular shape, seemed to be the only thing in the world right now that made sense and wasn't making panic-inducing sounds, so he held onto it as if it was his last lifeline to self-control and sanity. It probably was.

"I'm gonna get stung!" squealed Laura, scooting down in her seat and staring in horror up at the two-inch parcel of rage. Her back was scrunched down into the spot her rear would normally occupy, and her hands were clutching at the plastic packet as though their life depended on it, crushing the remaining cake. The cream filling had burst out and gunked up the wrapping. "Make it get out!!"

"H-hang on—just— just stay still and it won't bother you!"

This was possibly one of the cruelest lies James had ever told.

Wasps could sense fear.

It was with this in mind that James decided to start frantically looking for a place to pull over.

But this course of action came too late, because around that point (possibly attracted to the sweet cream and pastry in the girl's hands), the wasp zipped downwards over her lap to waver inquisitively (but still threateningly) back and forth, like a mafioso asking someone if they were here to pay back the six-figure loan they'd taken out earlier that month.

Laura screeched and flung the package away instantly.

A normal person would have thrown it straight ahead, so that it would hit the windshield and bounce off onto the dashboard.

But not Laura.

Whether she'd done it on purpose or whether her presence itself merely bent the rules of physics in whatever manner would most result in the harm or embarrassment of James Sunderland, the trajectory of the gluey bundle of cake and plastic was squarely in James's direction. It hit him in the side of the head and then rolled grotesquely down his shoulder and onto the floor, leaving a smudgy trail of orange goo in its wake. He let out a grunt of surprise when it hit, and the car wobbled back and forth precariously.

Laura didn't seem to notice.

"GET IT AWAY!" she wailed, kicking her legs frantically and covering her face with both hands.

"C-careful! You'll just make it MAD—!" James stammered, trying to brake from the sudden burst of acceleration that had resulted from him slamming his foot on the gas, startled by her flailing.

He instantly regretted speaking because, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, one of Laura's little tennis shoes made contact with the insect and sent it flying upwards, where it proceeded to bounce off the ceiling, regain its balance, and immediately begin zipping back and forth even more furiously than before.

"GET IT OUT GET IT OUT GET IT OUT!"

James was about to tell her to stop thrashing around, since that was just more likely to get her stung, only for the warning to die in his throat when the enraged insect came thrusting through the air in his direction, instead.

The noise that wound up escaping him was more of a breahless, sputtering mass of unrelated letters than a cry for mercy (which was what it had started as in his head) as his back SLAMMED against the driver's side door, shoulders hunching up in feeble defense because there was no other way to escape the thing without actively throwing the door open and leaping from the moving vehicle.

James had never liked bugs. Not once in his entire life.

South Ashfield Heights had never been a bastion of good housekeeping. Summer brought armies of ants and plentiful numbers of fruit flies, house flies, and just about every other type of fly James could name. The cockroaches were simply there all year round. Pest services had occasionally been suggested by various tenants, but it might as well have been going in one ear and out the other as far as Frank Sunderland had been concerned. Not even the man in Room 207's door-pounding and angry tirades about the ants that had infested his smoke detector'd had any effect. But then, his own father was the only person in the building James had known who was not intimidated by Mr. Braintree. All resentment for Frank aside, that was something James had always been slightly awed by.

This didn't stop him from spending most of his youth desperately wishing he could call an exterminator himself without getting in colossal trouble, though.

Now, in his adulthood, James obviously did not shriek at unmanly octaves and climb onto chairs when he saw an ant trundle across the floor. It had been a young age when he'd arrived at a shaky truce between himself and the bugs of the world, which was that if they did their own thing and let him do his, he wouldn't stomp them on principal.

This truce did not apply when a nickel-sized, brightly-colored bundle of concentrated wrath was buzzing around three inches in front of his face.

James made a strangled noise that was half inhalation and writhed in his seat. The car swerved in response and Laura screamed again, shrilly.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" her voice defied all reason in pitch and actually disappeared entirely towards the end of her sentence, transcending the level of sound audible to human ears and entering the range only discernable to dogs and paranoid housewives.

Later it would occur to James that this all would have been much easier if he hadn't had a hysterical child in the car with him, but for the moment all he could focus on was his own impending doom. He rolled his shoulder urgently, both trying to dissuade the wasp from getting closer and avoid it at the same time. It was not a particularly effective strategy.

"I— ah! AGH!"

He had no choice but to watch helplessly out of the corner of his eye as the wasp settled onto his sleeve as contently as something in a permanent state of soul-destroying fury could, attracted to the smudge of moist, spongy orange pastry and whipped cream.

Frantically, James tried to wipe it off, but the wasp took serious issue with this invasion upon its desired meal and it collided angrily with his fingers, wings buzzing loudly against them on impact. He let out an embarrassingly high-pitched yip and jerked his hand away as quickly as if it had actually been stung.

"LAURA! Laura, roll down a window! Roll down your window so that it can get out!!" he ordered frantically, cringing against the window and causing the car's path to lean dangerously to the legt.

"No WAY! Then it'll just come towards ME!!"

She was flattened against her own window now, watching him with wide eyes that seemed nonetheless relieved that the wasp was no longer interested in her. "It's all the way over there with YOU! Roll YOURS down!"

If he hadn't been so busy panicking, he'd have mustered up a hot flare of anger at her unwillingness to cooperate, but he was more concerned with other things. Like the living pain dispenser that was buzzing down once more to settle on his arm like it owned it, mandibles working hungrily on the patch of high-fructose corn syrup and orange dye no. 1 that was decorating his sleeve like a badge of dishonor.

Sob.

"But—I—it won't get off!"

Finally taking one hand off the wheel, he flailed the wasp-bearing arm uselessly. It took flight at last— only to immediately aim for another blob of congealed Corgi-Cake... which was directly in the center of James's right cheek.

Horns blared all around as the little blue Oldsmobile swerved so hard it almost went skidding off the road, its worn old tires protesting with almost doglike whines.

Their dull squeals were soon joined by the only sound James had been dreading even more than the deafening buzz of a wasp crawling into his ear: a police siren.

His heart dropped into his stomach.

Oh, no.

"... You're in big trouble," Laura observed unecessarily, looking at him evenly. As though she hadn't just been screaming and making a scene over their unwanted vespine hijacker.

James swallowed, not replying, and glanced over at his rear-view mirror. Sure enough, the blue and white lights flashed, signaling him to pull over. There was no convenient spot to do so, but... the side of the road would just have to do.

Feeling unparalleled dread clench up his body like a paralyzing poison, James flicked the turn signal on with leaden hands and brought it to a halt with a scrape of dirt and gravel.

The indignant cars behind him immediately whizzed past as the police car eased to a stop behind him.

Suddenly in the face of the lights and the sputtering siren, the insect invader seemed very unimportant. James and Laura exchanged a solemn glance, silently concurring on this. Then James gulped hard and looked at the rear-view again. This time, the visage of the car was blotted out by an approaching figure. They were wearing blue and something bright glimmered metalically by their chest.

Crap crap crap crap crap.

"Uh— sit down and straighten up!" James hissed out of the side of his mouth to Laura, shifting a little in his seat, himself.

For once in her life, she did as she was told. Naturally, it was the one time he was too busy feeling sick with dread to care.

He had known, deep down, that something like this would happen eventually, and he knew just as deep down that he would accept whatever came to him. But at the same time, something howled in frustration at the thought that this should end so soon. He'd barely even had a chance of fulfilling his promise to Mary.

James felt more than saw the cop draw up in front of the window, and when she cleared her throat, he turned his head timidly to look at the person that could potentially end his freedom right now.

She looked to be somewhere in her forties, lean and wizened, with a pair of dark sunglasses that hid her eyes despite the cloudiness of the sky above. Her black-gloved hands were already flipping open a little pad of paper, and James cringed at the sight. In his mind's eye, he recalled the countless late-night cop shows that had played between the infomercials he'd fallen asleep to on so many nights.

Her path had stopped about three feet from the car and she was now standing there, one hand by her ear. He didn't dare look closer— some deep, paranoid part of him thought that might somehow make it worse. He couldn't tell whether or not she was looking straight in at him or observing the rest of his car.

Why is she taking so long?

He shot a glance to Laura, but found no answers in the little girl's wary, closed-off stare. He supposed he should have expected no less. She HAD said she didn't like the police, after all... Eyes flicking back to the cop, who was still standing in the same spot, he thought nervously for a moment about rolling down the window just so that she'd get on with it.

Is she waiting for me to do something?

What if she's calling reinforcements because she thinks I'm being uncooperati— OH GOD.

Quite suddenly, she had leaned down to the window and rapped on it. The wasp, which was now on his collar, let out a warning buzz when James startled in his seat. Positive that he looked as guilty as he felt, James winced and shifted just enough so that he could crank the window down with one arm, trying to keep as still as possible. Once the plexiglass sheet disappeared down into its slot, the policewoman cleared her throat.

"Sir."

"Ma'am?" James replied meekly.

A reply did not come right away. She merely stared at him for a moment, mouth pressed into a grim line that bent somewhere past the middle— like the diagram to one of the geometry proofs he'd struggled so hard with in high school. The dark, glossy lenses in front of her eyes made it impossible to see just what she was looking at— was it him, or the interior of the car? Was she looking for signs of drug paraphernalia? ... Or bodies? Did she recognize him on sight? Was that why she was just standing there? Were the police already looking for a strange man driving around with a missing orphan? Was she stalling for time?

... Oh god, what if there was something wrong with her? What if she needed an ambulance? He didn't have a phone!

The silence finally became too much to bear and, now more worried than sheepish, James turned a little more, trying again.

"Uh... ma'am?"

Her face twitched ever so slightly, and then she abruptly continued as though she'd never paused.

"Sir, I've been tailing you for the past quarter-mile. Do you know why you were pulled over?" The cop's voice was as lean and dry as her build. It made him think of the beef jerky he'd never finished eating.

"Uh—I... I have a hunch," James said weakly. He didn't dare glance at himself in the mirror, but he had a feeling that he looked pale. He felt pale.

"Uh huh." She straightened up again, lips pursed and expression not overly friendly. "Care to share?"

"Well," James faltered. She was staring in his direction, but not quite at him— more at some spot just barely to his left— and something about that was making him incredibly nervous. Throat bobbing, his eyes wandered down to the right, where the maurading insect was still clinging to his sleeve, chewing at he remains of the cake. He could see its abdomen rippling ominously. "Well, uh... there was..."

The wasp was on his right arm, and therefore invisible to the policewoman's off-kilter stare, but Laura was watching it like a hawk, her eyes glued onto it and her hand firmly on the door-handle in the event that it moved and she needed to make a speedy escape.

Evidently losing patience with James, or more accurately if the direction her shaded gaze was pointed was any indication, his ear, the policewoman spoke up again.

"Sir, I don't think I need to tell you that such behavior behind the wheel endangers everyone on the road, not just yourself," she told the space beside his head dryly. "Can I see your license and registration, please?"

Uh oh.

This would be a problem for a couple of reasons.

The first being that although no one had ever particularly noticed or cared where he was before, he had certainly been gone long enough for someone to realize he and Mary (and Laura...) were gone. What if Laura had been reported missing— and a closer looked told the police officer that she was a runaway? Or even worse, a kidnapping victim? What if HE'D been reported missing? Would she recognize his name, and question why the hell a missing, childless man whose wife had just died was driving down through Connecticut with a mysterious little girl that wasn't his?

The second (and more immediately alarming) was of course the fact that reaching for his wallet would involve moving his arm. He did not want to move his arm. He was pretty sure that if he moved his arm, not even the thick material of his coat would be enough to protect him from the unholy wrath that the insect would unleash upon him.

He licked his lips and shot a look at Laura (who was pale as a sheet).

"I, uh... I can't do that right now."

For the first time, the cop looked straight at him.

Then her gaze drifted to the left once more. But it was enough to give him another dose of the willies.

"Excuse me?"

"No! I mean— uh— sorry, I'm not trying to not... cooperate, or— gh!"

A buzz had sounded suddenly next to his ear and he jumped in his seat, biting back a very undignified noise. The wasp, apparently having grown disinterested in the cake smear, had finally lifted off and zipped out the now-open window, a slightly more content brand of angry than it had started out as. It flitted past the cop's face and she flinched away from it slightly, turning to look at its departing path far more directly than she'd looked at James even once since arriving at the window.

"Oh," she said.

James tried to think of something to say that would sum it up better than that, couldn't come up with anything, and just sort of nodded lamely.

The officer shook her head and at first James was sure that it was with a certain amount of amusement, but when she looked back at him (or rather in his general direction since her gaze continued to slip off of him like water off of wax paper), her expression was just as dry as before. She held out a gloved hand.

"License and registration."

Now that his arm was no longer burdened with a penny's worth of death, he didn't have an excuse. Nodding reluctantly, he lifted his hand at last and rummanged in his pocket until he finally produced a battered wallet. Opening it with some difficulty, he eventually tugged out his driver's license and papers for the car and handed them over, head bowed.

She took it from him and, shifting her weight heavily to lean on a stiff leg, looked it over with pursed lips, scrutinizing it for what seemed like an eternity. James watched her apprehensively, waiting for the other foot to drop.

At last she frowned and spoke, looking up from the glossy little card.

"Well, Mister..." She trailed off, squinting back down for a second or two before shaking her head, seemingly deciding that calling him by name was too much trouble. "Your situation, while understandable, was no excuse for the kind of driving I just saw. You and your little girl could have wound up dead."

James nodded, head hanging. He was too worried to feel guilty at the moment, but he was pretty sure he'd feel the sting in the morning. He didn't give much of a damn about his own safety, but he'd been letting Laura go beltless larely for the sake of avoiding argument with her wherever possible. He knew better than that... Mary would be ashamed.

In the meantime, he had to settle with mentally thanking the universe that Laura had enough self-control not to burst into an indignant rant at being referred to as 'his'. Even if it probably had more to do with the fact that she was sullenly silent in the presence of a cop than anything else. Why make things more complicated? It was probably better this lady thought she was his daughter.

"—and frankly, considering neither of you is wearing a seatbelt, I have no sympathy for your situation. Whether or not you wear one is your own choice, but letting your daughter go without one is not only reprehensible, it's against the law. One wrong move on the road out there while you were weaving like that and you could have both been killed. Do you understand me?"

James nodded.

"Y— ... yes, ma'am. I, uh... it won't happen again, officer."

She nodded as well, but her expression did not soften. "I'm going to have to cite you for reckless driving."

A few months ago, being written a ticket might have made James just sigh and smack his head on the steering wheel in frustration.

But now it made his heart plummet into his stomach.

This was it.

It was over now.

A ticket meant he'd have to pay it. To pay it, he'd need to deal more with the police. Dealing more with the police meant that sooner or later, something would come out.

Feeling like he'd just swallowed a rock, he watched miserably as she set her pad of paper down on the car's hood and began to laboriously fill the form out, glancing back and forth from his license for the necessary information. He didn't need to look at her long to know that she was paying meticulous attention to each and every line.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled lowly to Laura, turning to look apologetically in the girl's direction.

She stared evenly back. "This is all your fault," she told him with every ounce of disgust she could muster.

"Here." The cop had returned to the window and was holding out the ticket, folded neatly down the middle. "Let this be a lesson. And be thankful this is the worst you're getting."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, taking the ticket ruefully. On second thought, he was actually grateful for the fact that she never looked him in the eyes— he felt bad enough without having someone glaring at him in addition to Laura.

She withdrew her hand and stood for a moment longer before giving the roof of the car a distracted pat and turning to head stiffly back to her own.

As soon as the rear-view mirror yielded the sight of the squad-car's door closing and the lights being turned off with a dying whine, James sagged against the steering wheel and let out a broken groan. That had been close. That had been way, way too close. In fact, there was a distinct possibility that it had been literally been too close.

Go figure he'd blow it right when everything had seemed to be off to a smooth start.

He had no time to dwell, though, because Laura finally piped up in a resentful mumble after a few moments of shell-shocked silence. "... I don't like seatbelts."

James sighed. Realizing he had been sweating profusely through the whole conversation, James shifted awkwardly in his seat to pull his heavy coat off, watching the police car's blue-striped sides disappear down the road.

"Well... you heard her... we'd better both wear 'em..."

Despite his words, he wasn't reaching for his own. His arms were listening to that little part of him inside that said That wouldn't be right! rather than obeying what his mouth was saying.

Laura made a sour face in respone, but reached up to snag her own seatbelt, yanking it around herself like one might a particularly stubborn snake out of its tank. It clicked into its holder with a metallic little snap.

James put his perspiration-covered hands on the wheel and clenched them for a moment, taking a few deep breaths as he looked at the folded piece of paper in his hand. Part of him didn't even want to look at it— just wanted to chuck it out the window and forget about it. Even if there wasn't a single other thing to worry about aside from the fee... it was money. Money he had to watch now that he ws driving around with no job, no address, and no guarantee of being able to replenish it down the line.

Money, and a record.

If his actions caught up with him in the real world somewhere far down the line, that was one thing. He would take what he deserved, and he would do it with regret but not fear, because he had already been given worse punishments by far than the court of law could give to him without crossing the line of "cruel and unusual". Mary had forgiven him, whether or not it was right or wrong for her to do so. He had already taken her life for granted— and he did not want to throw away her forgiveness as easily.

But with a sigh, he sat up again, running one hand down his face.

Might as well check to see what the damage was.

"The police person left, I saw her go down the road," Laura interjected impatiently, sitting up to stare at the cars whizzing past. "Aren't we gonna go?"

"Just hang on, Laura."

The girl sniffed loudly. "Fine."

She promptly unbuckled her seatbelt again and slid off the seat, getting down on her hands and knees to try and find whatever was left of the ruined snack cake.

Resting his elbows on the wheel, James held up the ticket and unfolded it with one nerve-jittery thumb, bracing himself for bad news.

By the time Laura had crawled back up onto the seat, empty-handed and sulking over the loss of her treat, roughly five minutes and several dozen cars outside had passed. James had not moved an inch.

"We gotta stop at another store," she informed him, buckling herself back in. "It got lint and dirt and floor-stuff all over it, so I pushed it under the seat."

James didn't reply. He felt like someone had poured a bucket of ice into his stomach.

Noting his silence, as well as the fact that the car was still motionless, Laura tilted her head, giving him a funny look.

"Huh? What's the matter? Did she write something bad?"

It took a second or two to muster the will to speak. When he did, his voice was slightly hollow... and held the barest twinge of a shake.

"I don't... know."

What was not written on the slip, to his minor relief, was a hefty fine.

But the relief had drained away like lukewarm bathwater as soon as he started reading what was.

Too curious not to peek, Laura leaned over to take a look for herself.

"... What's n-slash-a mean?"

"Not Available," murmured James, staring blankly at the space his name and address should have occupied. Or Never Again...

Printed in painstakingly-neat handwriting upon each and every line, from the information she should have been (and had seemed to be) copying down from his license, to the offense, the fine, the court date— were the letters N/A.

"... Oh." Laura looked at it a moment longer before shrugging and scooting back into her usual position. "Can we go?"

"Yeah," said James absently, taking the wheel again and navigating the car back onto the road once there was a lull in traffic. The cars driving by, as soon as he hadn't been inadvertently threatening to swerve right into them, had started going straight past, not even slowling down to get a better look at the spastically-driven blue car being pulled over. It took a moment or two of them zipping past incessantly before there was a chance for him to actually locate a gap and pull into it, checking his mirror incessantly.

But his eyes kept slipping over to the slip of paper, now slightly damp from where his hand had clenched it, and every time his eys wandered over the spaces and remembered what they were supposed to contain, he shuddered.

~*~

"Hey, Laura, did that lady seem weird to you?"

Over the dull din of the television, Laura turned in the air to face him as she partook in her nightly bed-bouncing ritual. "Huh? The police person? Weird how?"

"Well, I dunno," James said, shifting so that he was lying on his side. "Just... weird."

It had been about six and a half hours since their unfortunate encounter with the wasp and the cop car, and they had since found their shelter for the night and checked in, as usual. As the weeks had passed, even their evening activities had started to become routine: Laura would leap incessantly on her bed while James located the channel he'd discovered that seemed to play nothing but marathons of old Three Stooges episodes (largely so that he wouldn't have to again experience Laura screaming directly into his ear to wake him up when the fishy cable channel that had previously been showing Looney Toons had inexplicably switched over to its adult line of programming once midnight had passed), and then both would attend to their respective needs— James usually curling up in bed and passing out embarrassingly earlier than Laura, who reveled in her new freedom to watch as much TV as she wanted, as late as she wanted.

Right now she was bouncing up and down in perfect time with the zany sound effects springing from the television's speakers as the three titular characters engaged in a wacky chase scene involving a skunk.

"She wasn't weird, she was just a nasty ol' police person," she said, speaking in short bursts with each bounce. Although the incident had rattled her at the time, she seemed to have mostly forgotten about it, save of course for the parts she could directly blame on James. "But she did have a wart. Right here. So she may have been a witch."

"Well, I wasn't talking about warts," James said, ignoring Laura's jabbing motions at her own cheek. "I just mean... aw, forget about it..."

He had spent most of the afternoon and early evening trying desperately to do just that. But the strange encounter had rattled his sense of security so hard that not even the passing trees, music from the radio, or the ridiculous noises coming from the television could drive the sight of that cryptic citation (which was now lying folded in the glove compartment) out of his mind. The whole thing had shattered the pleasant lull that the past few weeks had been steeped in, putting him on edge and off-appetite.

He'd pondered long and hard about what reason might have been behind the disconcerting message— or lack thereof, rather— on the ticket. After all, he'd watched the officer fill it out with his own eyes. Perhaps not as observantly as he could have, but he'd seen the furrowed brow and forcibly-steady hand as she'd checked his card between each and every blank.

It had occurred to him at one point that maybe she'd been kidding with him— giving him the ol' bad-cop routine and trying to scare him by acting like she was about to throw the book in his face, only to psych him out by handing him something that was scrap paper as far as any police station could be concerned. For a brief period (maybe fifteen minutes), he had even convinced himself that was what happened.

But then he remembered her expression. The dry, mirthless way she had watched the wasp buzz out the window, and the sternness in her tone as she had lectured him on the reckless endangerment of what she thought was his very own child...

Unless she was the best actress the world had ever seen... she had not been faking it.

Between that and the way she had stared straight through him... the whole thing left James with that sick sense of dread, that awful feeling like his stomach was lined with wet newspaper.

Laura, on the other hand, didn't seem too bothered— but then, what concern would an eight-year-old have for traffic tickets, so long as it hadn't ended with them being led away from the car in handcuffs?

As if on cue, the bouncing girl then added cheekily, "Did ya think you were gonna get 'rrested? Were ya scared?"

James rolled his eyes and scooted around so that he could lie on his side and still watch the TV. "You were scared, too."

"I'm little, I'm allowed," Laura said, with the smugness of a child who knows exactly what she can and can't get away with due to age and fully intends to exploit both to the best of her ability. Apparently admitting to fear was alright to do as long as she could make fun of James at the same time. "And anyway... if you hadn't freaked out, the police lady wouldn't have noticed and gotten you in trouble. So it's all your fault. And you still owe me Corgi-Cakes."

He stifled a sigh that was more habit than actual annoyance at this point.

"Well, there's still a little bit of it left on my coat if you wanna go scrape it off..."

Laura's response was to kick one of the pillows off of her bed and in his direction. It didn't hit him (apparently it was hard to be accurate when you were jumping up and down), though it did bounce onto his own set of cushions.

There had once been a time when he would have grabbed it for himself, grinned, and said something like 'Wellp, guess this is mine now!', but those playful days had ended quite a long time ago. So he just turned his head a little to look at where it had landed, then looked back to Laura, hoping his expression looked appropriately long-suffering.

In truth, though, he didn't much mind. The debate was a welcome distraction from his thoughts.

"You know, you were the one who smashed the cake..." he pointed out. "... And then threw it at me."

"Yeah, cuz you're a fartface," Laura retorted. Ah, yes. The old standby. James knew it well.

Usually he ignored it— the insult sort of lost its sting when he wasn't actively trying not to get his neck snapped by creatures who only had access to him because Laura had shut him up in their lair. Tonight, though... something about tonight, between the (at least partially-undeserved, he felt) blame for the snacks and the pull-over, and his own desire to escape the creeping malaise that was blanketing his thoughts surrounding the whole afternoon... made him want to bite back a little bit.

Just a little.

Perhaps that was the old James surfacing.

But hey, they'd been doing so well. It wouldn't hurt to have a little fun, would it?

Not replying, James leaned over the side of the bed, groping around for one of the plastic grocery bags they'd brought in with them from the car. Upon finding it, he snagged a handle and hauled it up onto the bed with him. On the opposite bed, Laura slowly ceased her bouncing and watched him curiously as he pulled out one of several boxes of the overly-sweet cereal that she insisted they remain in possession of at all times.

He stared at her evenly as he thumbed open the box, feeling like a rebel. It wasn't until he was tearing open the plastic bag inside that she realized that yes, he was in fact doing exactly what it looked like. Her jaw dropped in pure outrage.

"You—... YOU! Those are MINE!"

Withdrawing an overflowing handful of the brightly-colored cereal, James took a moment to gaze at the infuriated little girl, fighting the urge to smirk.

"You can't have any of those, you— you big fat— ... fartface!" she squealed angrily, bunching her little fists.

James responded by stuffing the cereal into his mouth and munching on it pointedly.

And that was the night he learned that having two sharp eight-year-old feet slam into his ribcage from all the way across the room was, despite his doubts, perfectly possibly when aided by a bouncy mattress, and that in the end it was sort of easier to stick with brooding to himself than try to match wills with Laura.

With sore sides and a windpipe full of cereal dust, James ruefully turned onto his side to face the window, while Laura reclined with her reclaimed cereal box, triumphantly returning to her TV-viewing from the comfort of her own bed, which was now something of a fortress considering she had also claimed all of James's pillows as part of her conquest.

Sticking to thoughts of doom, gloom, and that general sense of creeping stormclouds that had snuck in like an unwanted guest ever since James had laid eyes on the letters N/A in place of the information that made him existent in the big system of things as he drifted off was, while unpleasant, probably better for his own health.

Even if there was something wholly inappropriate about slipping into a restless sleep while zany sproinging noises and Curly's 'whoop-whoop-whoop-WHOOP!' played incessantly in the background.























Red.

Green.

Red.

Green.

Red.

Green.

The stoplight hung at an angle far above the street, suspended in the air on its tangled wires like a trapeze artist that didn't quite make the leap and now dangled, helpless, hanging onto both swings for dear life lest they fall to their death in front of an audience of hundreds.

Except that there was no audience— save for James.

The soles of his boots echoed flatly as they carried him down the broad stretch of cracked and buckled pavement that had once been a road. There was no breeze— the mist that moistened his face was hanging in the air with a stillness that matched the rest of the town around him.

From the moment he had stepped into it, the entire town had been still.

Although the town's name had always been appropriate— first in that quaint, almost cheesy way that so obviously appealed to young romantics like himself and his bride, and then in a way that stopped being cute and grew chillingly fitting, almost prophetic— this place was never completely silent.

Silence, James had learned, was not the absence of sound entirely, but that strange lack of the noises of life that everyone came to take for granted. The ever-present burr of planes overhead, the whoosh of cars passing, the dull thud of basslines pounding behind walls and rolled-up windows.

Silence was the stripping-away of all that, when a person was allowed to hear the real sounds of the world, the ones that they forgot about entirely until they set foot in a place like Silent Hill.

The low, normally-inaudible hum of the lights as they flicked on and off, and the tiny metallic twang that accompanied the different bulbs as they alternated... the soft, tender scream of wires and cables rubbing on each other as they drifted back and forth between poles and across streets...

And more than ever, the sound of the buildings themselves, the buildings that loomed up from near-invisibility as he neared them, like ships in a fog-coated harbor.

Everyone knows that buildings creak in the night, but James had never realized, before this town, that buildings breathed.

The silence of this town was filled with breathing.

Hanging in the air with as much presence as the mist was the deep, low groan of wooden foundations sagging and sighing, exhaling their old, old air as they shifted in space like old men sinking into their rocking chairs more comfortably.

And somewhere in the middle of all those old, huge voices, all that sound, were the thin, ragged, and very, very small gasping breaths that were coming from James Sunderland himself as he wandered through the town's hallowed veins.

There were no monsters this time— no gnarled and contorted abominations leaping out of the shadows or staggering after him through the fog. The place was utterly empty, and he found himself traveling a familiar path, his feet directing him down broken boulevards and misty alleyways almost as if they knew where he was going even better than his head did.

The fog, drifting gently along with him the entire time despite the lack of wind (almost if, like the buildings, it had a life of its own) parted only briefly in his wake before it slipped back into place again, blurring his trail like waves cleansing a shoreline of footprints. And yet, the further he went, the more it thinned— his path grew clearer and clearer the narrower the streets and cul-de-sacs he traveled down became.

Eventually, as he emerged into a tiny, grafitti-tatooed alley whose floor was lined with trash cans and whose open ceiling was criss-crossed with clotheslines, the fog had almost disappeared entirely. It was brighter here; as bright as it ever got in Silent Hill. Soft shafts of light cut down between the curtains of hanging cloth that made up the patchwork canopy above.

In one of them, small splashes of color and life danced in the otherwise dead and monochrome world— butterflies.

James was mesmerized— wanted to stop and crouch to watch them as they fluttered to and fro— but his feet carried him straight past them without hesitation. His eyes, however, could not be torn away so easily, and he did not miss catching sight of the words Never Again, messily spray-painted, on the wall behind them.

At the end of the alley was a metal staircase— one he recognized. Oh yes, he knew exactly where he was... but unlike the real thing and its namesake, this staircase went straight down instead of ascending skyward. The symbolism was not lost on James and he began to shake as his path took him down the stairs, each step rattling. The light of the clear-aired alley was soon gone entirely, leaving him in a dark place.

He knew where this one was, too— even before his dreamy eyes adjusted to the dull, sourceless red glow that now served as the only light.

That coppery must of rust and old blood, the thrum of a fan and its steady rush of cold air, the stickiness of the floor below his feet, and the clink of dangling chains in the cramped space told him all he needed to know, and by the time he could distinguish the puddle of dark liquid blossoming slowly towards him across the dank, stained concrete, he already knew that he didn't want to see what it was coming from. Yet he froze in place, his boots anchored to the floor as he strained to see ahead.

Even though he knew that no matter which one it was, be it pink leopard-print, blue and white stripes, or flower-covered silk, it would hurt. It would hurt more than anything.

But before he could tell for sure, a terrible sound reached his ears— a sound that shook every dreaming bone in his body like a tuning fork beat against the edge of a table.

The harsh, grating familiar shriek of something sharp and huge being dragged across the floor by a clumsy hand— and so close behind him that the very sound of it made the taste of copper spring to his tongue.

He would die before he ever forgot that sound.

A moist, feverish gush of arcane breath, hotter and stronger than but somehow just the same as the slow sighs of the town above, blew against the back of his neck.



James came awake in a horrified, gasping rush, eyes wide and whole body heaving like it had just run a marathon. He had curled up during sleep in such a way that his blankets were twined suffocatingly around his body, his fingers twisted into them with a desperate, white-knuckled grip.

Spluttering, he made a brief effort to free himself before giving up when his hands refused to cooperate. Panting raggedly in a voice that was almost a sob, he craned is head to gaze frantically across the room.

Laura, lit up in flickering blue-white by the television screen, was sound asleep in her own bed, nestled in her fortress of pillows with her arms and legs all askew. It was the sound sleep of someone who wasn't worried about anything— wasn't dreaming of old demons. A child's sleep.

Still gasping, James watched her helplessly for a moment before his eyes were drawn to the television.

As it sometimes happened, the channel had reached the end of their material for the day and now all the screen showed was blinding snow, accompanied by a soundtrack of gushing static. James let his head hit the mattress again, eyes wide open and arms wrapping around himself for lack of anything else solid to hang onto. He could have gotten up and fumbled for the remote, or hell, even staggered right over to the TV itself and turned it off manually, but even awake, he still felt caught deep in the throes of the nightmare, muscles locked in place and cold sweat coating him from head to toe. Like the bad dreams he'd woken from as a child, only to lie there stiff as a corpse and still save for the shivering, lest whatever he'd been dreaming about be in the room with him, waiting for movement to strike at.

He'd been stupid.

He'd been so, so stupid.

How could he have honestly thought that his true freedom was anything but temporary...?

Half-tangled in blankets and curled in the fetal position, James listened to the static and shook.