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Ghost Town	By : Xel Category: +S through Z > Silent Hill Views: 2203 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Silent Hill, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Ghost Town
- 1
A/N: I don’t own Silent Hill. But you knew that
already.
---
Ghost Town

Henry woke on the crudely linked
grating of his hallway to find no one else around him and nothing wrong at all.
This was a relative statement, of course, and he was thinking comparatively; he
didn’t know when he had begun to accept the dried-blood peel of sloughed scabs
as his wallpaper or the creak and groan of haunted staircases as fact— didn’t want
to know, certainly, in tiny ways— but right now he felt tranquil, unperturbed.
Almost at ease. A man’s heavy footfalls shuffled along somewhere down below.
For the first time in a long while,
his head didn’t hurt a bit.
It was like Henry to concentrate on
the present moment and live there with a kind of half-bemused dispassion day by
day, which then filtered sedate light into the current retrospective he leafed
through in his head and made him figure that this, this was the reason
why he’d taken it all as well as he had. It just wasn’t in his essentia to feel
extremely. Even now, the dense chainlink bit figure-eight grooves into his
palms as he propped himself up, and the pain thereof was more obtuse than
acute.
Voices, then. Human ones, along the
corridor below him, and one more in the room down the hall.
Eileen? Eileen.
The door closed in like a camera
zoom, numbers panning into view one by one, backwards: three, then oh, then
three. It stood cracked, no lock-on-chain or deadbolt to bar him entry. With
something resembling a frown between his eyebrows, he nudged it open and floated
in slowly.
Her apartment had that clean woody
smell of a new pencil; it was tidy and sacrosanct and feminine, none of which
were affections he’d attached to it the first time. But now the day outside her
window shone bright and gray, colorless, placid, and a few stilted notes of a
song he didn’t know wafted in from the bedroom.
“Eileen,” he called experimentally.
His voice made an awkward cracking sound around the second syllable.
She stopped humming, and for a
second everything in the apartment froze in time. The first thing Henry heard
was her ragged attempt at guessing his name as she breathed out a hot Hhh—
“…Henry?”
“Yeah,” he ventured, finally
wandering in and seeing her, as if for the first time, face to face. She sat on
her bed, legs tucked up under the gauzy white of a nightshirt. Everything was a
little whiter than it should have been, from her sheets to her ransacked
dresser to the sleek purple dress and tiny roads made of plaster and bandages
that lay abdicated on the hardwood floor. The cool seasonless light from her
window haloed her head, and she smiled a smile of grateful relief at the sight
of him.
“Oh, God,” she said, “I knew you’d
come eventually.”
The corner of his mouth twitched up
a perfunctory fraction. Her head bowed, shoulders hunching with the admission:
“I woke up right here about a hour ago. I think. But I was afraid to leave the
room.”
“I,” Henry began. Vaguely shook his
head. The light was… unfamiliar. “Don’t know what happened.”
Well, he knew what happened to
Eileen. Shredded, ripped to strips with one final, thready cry jerked out of
her black and green and purple throat. And then he cleaved savagely at Walter
with the axe, feeling muscle split under every strike, tendons, slicing Walter
apart fiber by fiber and struggling to pull the blade free as it lodged itself
in bone—
And then a blur, and then pain,
and then nothing. And then here, he guessed. And then Eileen’s bedroom.
“Henry.”
This wasn’t Heaven.
“Are we dead?”
---
There were
no holes anymore. That was the first thing Henry noticed when exploring this
world. No holes, no monsters, and no ghosts.
But there
were people.
“All things
considered, I…”
They sat in
front of South Ashfield Heights’ front door, gazing into the pale and derelict
city.
“I’m glad
to be outside again.”
Henry
imagined that Joseph hadn’t felt this good in a while.
---
Eileen had
left her apartment after he’d come. He stirred atop her salt-scented sheets,
feebly reluctant to leave the dreamless stupor he would later come to accept as
sleep. As he blinked away the last cobweb suggestions of fatigue from around
his head, a tearing howl split the air and sent him clamoring up and rifling
through the room for a gun, a knife, God, anything until he realized
that the sound’s source came not from the bedroom, but from the tiny hole at
his feet. Pressing his eye to the wall, he mused that Eileen could have seen
him after all, if she’d wanted to— or at least the single moist iris that
passed as Henry in such dire straits.
It was him.
It was Walter. Walter on his knees in the diseased living room and god was
he glad he never decided to go back in there and shouting with everything
he had at the ungodly rotting relief above the couch viscous rusty-dark matter
sliding and slopping off the ceiling in wet chunks while the little boy
sniffled and sobbed somewhere beyond his line of sight.
“What is
it, Mom? Goddammit, why don’t you say something?”
God help
him Henry almost felt sad for the man no the boy no the entity pulsing walls
puckering and turning black all around him.
“Wake the fuck up, Mom—!”
Everything about him was erratic
and disintegrating and his voice crackled all raw and razor-edged with hysteria
in his throat and Henry thought that just maybe it wouldn’t do to dehumanize
him with a term like “entity” with a wailing boy in the corner. He lowered his
head and let it rest against the wall, eyes straining at the sudden overexposure
of Eileen’s bedroom.
“I’m
sorry.”
No.
He peered
back in just in time to see Eileen glowing barefoot Eileen in her long white
men’s dress-shirt cross over the filth between old Walter and unseen little
Walter and bend down to touch old Walter’s quaking shoulder-blade I’m so sorry she
said and Henry looked away.
Then, as
gently as she could, so Henry could barely hear, “but it wasn’t gonna work.
Even from the beginning, it wasn’t gonna help you, d’you know that? But I’m so,
so sorry…”
Little
Walter hiccupped.
Henry
wanted to yell out a warning but couldn’t and found himself fighting against
his own impulses for reasons he couldn’t even begin to fathom because
Eileen was going to die subsumed in the curdled brownpink slop that
tried to pass for carpet if he didn’t do somethi—
“You can’t understand it,” Walter
said, and he sounded only slightly bitter, like going the whole distance was
somehow too exhausting a task. “You’ll never… quite understand it.”
“I think I do,” Eileen soothed,
luminous arms rising slow and enfolding resistant Walter in an embrace that
Henry did not look at but realized. Walter twitched and jerked in her grasp,
Walter sniffled cautiously on the chair near the wall, but Henry saw neither
pair of eyes to know what he could be thinking in that moment.
She pulled away and gradually
stood, holding his hands in hers and pulling him along until they both
disappeared from the rounded periphery of Henry’s neglected scope of vision.
“I’ll be
your mommy from now on,” drifted her voice, soft and warm like blankets or
honey, “if you want.”
Little
Walter stopped crying.
---
Henry never saw the child again—
heard, rather— but from then on Walter followed Eileen like a shadow,
peculiarly introverted, peculiarly silent. Room 302 rotted noisily a few days
more before he finally banished it all away and to Henry’s knowledge, never
spoke of it again.
There was
still no way Henry was ever going back in there.
One day he
took a walk through empty Ashfield, ruminating on the picture-perfect clouds in
the sky. Just a nebulous veneer between earth and Heaven, never lifting, never
raining down. Walter could probably make it rain, he thought with a swell of
antipathy, if Eileen wanted him to.
These
weren’t nice thoughts running through his head, and that generally ended up a
bad idea. He never got that hungry anymore, never had to use the bathroom, only
rarely felt tired. He suspected that given long enough to test the theory, he
wouldn’t age, and in his sporadic talks with Joseph they had decided together
that they were all, in fact, dead. Dead and everlasting— presumably all twenty-one
of them, though Henry had only seen the three familiar others so far. Once he
thought he saw Richard slogging around on the other side of the complex, but he
and Eileen had been sitting in her room alone and his fingertips had skated
along the curve of her hip as they talked of pithy and eternal things, so he
didn’t care. Then she stood and opened the door into the decaying hallway
because she felt Walter coming, and then Henry ceased to exist and left.
In his
reverie he had only narrowly missed hitting a lightpost, giving him pause
enough to stop and actually look at his surroundings. Subway stairs.
And then
Cynthia, walking out of the lonely haze. When she saw him she didn’t walk, but
ran, colliding and clinging tight to his arms with pearly red nails. The fever
in her eyes made him back away a bit, not used to such violence of emotion
focused on him exclusively.
“Henry!
Henry, it’s me! Cynthia, remember? Do you see me?”
“Yeah, I
see you,” he insisted. Good lord, and he remembered: all that hair had been—
“Thank God!
I thought I was going crazy for a while. I saw you again in the subway and a
couple of times after that, but you always just ran away… like I was diseased
or something,” laughed Cynthia, apparently relieved. Henry thought he noticed
the crude jags of numbers on her breast for a second, but when he looked harder
her flesh was smooth and marked only by the soft brown of a furtive areola, and
she glimmered knowingly under his scrutiny.
“You kept
running away like that… Made me kinda sad, you know? I just wanted to give you
that favor I promised.”
Henry
suddenly couldn’t do this.
---
At Eileen’s
behest, the apartment was flawless and sterile in a way he hadn’t known in what
felt like years. It was pleasant, definitely, but almost… harsh, after so long.
Very, very tentatively, Joseph had ventured back into room 302. But
never once did he close the door. This was where Henry sat at the moment,
perched tensely on the edge of the couch while Joseph disappeared into the
bedroom in search of writings or pictures or some other thing that shouldn’t
logically be there.
A sick, raw
moan split the stillness, muffled by the wall. Grimacing, Henry peered through
the peephole.
All he saw
was the bottom half of Eileen’s body overlapped by Walter’s torso, legs hanging
suspended over the edge of the bed. He made out gentle shushing noises and the
stroke of one benevolent hand over Walter’s hair as he burrowed his face into
her stomach, she pacifying him with a velvety “It’ll be okay, honey…”
Henry did
not sleep in her bed that night. But then, he never did.
---
Old habits
die hard, so every day Henry came back to the hole in the wall while Joseph’s
back was turned.
Eileen sat
where she always did, alone, and for a second it was like it used to be with
her unfurling without knowing right before his greedy eyes. Walter’s whims
dictated that the day was frozen to stillness, and she wore something heavy and
shroud-like that exposed absolutely nothing, save for two soft white calves
made skinny by comparison with the coat’s bulk.
Walter’s
coat. Obstinate Walter, who couldn’t care less about anyone he’d pulled into
his dimension, save for one woman— for whom his fondness consisted of a
tug-of-war between vehement, smothering affection and vaguely perplexed
emotional distance. So Henry saw it. Through his peephole.
---
Eileen and
Walter standing, talking. She had just finished saying something, but Henry
couldn’t make out what. Walter studied her long and hard, eyes narrowed. Then
he softened, and in one movement that made him look too small for his body he
leaned down and kissed her cheek.
---
Eileen,
getting dressed. Breasts soft and goosebumped in the chill of the faux-morning.
Henry placed an errant hand on the front of his jeans before catching himself
and pulling it away.
---
Eileen and
Walter, or their legs, anyway, or something that resembled their legs
underneath the thin exposure of the sheet stretched across the bed. Eileen
holding onto him with her fingers in his hair, Walter swallowing down on
throaty groans of her name and things that made sense only to him and probably
Eileen too, hands fisting inconsequentially in the sheets.
---
Henry woke
to another day-that-was-not-a-day and propped himself up against Joseph Schreiber’s
couch cushions. He yawned a little, even though he didn’t need to and hadn’t
needed to once since coming here (he didn’t need anything: not food or
toilets or probably even air though he would breathe in and out anyway since he
was used to doing it but certainly not affection and certainly not sex),
and then strolled out the door without a word.
Eileen
greeted him with a smile when she opened the door. Wet hair, no Walter in
sight. When in walking through her apartment Henry successfully ascertained his
absence, he sat on the foot of her bed, looked down at the carpet between his
knees, and tried at last to smile back. She sat just far and just close enough
for it to matter to him. A respectable distance, one might say.
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen
you around, huh,” she lightly ventured.
“Yeah,” he
said.
“Where’ve
you been?”
“Right
here.”
Silence.
“Next
door.”
“Yeah.”
Eileen fell
back with a sweet little puff of shampoo (that he must’ve only imagined) and
lifted her hand to her forehead. Henry knew better than to follow. “Never
thought this would be it,” she murmured to the window above. She meant It.
“But I guess it’s not so bad.”
Henry said
nothing, then replied with a hollow “yeah.”
A hand
crept up his back. As far as he could tell, it was Eileen’s. It slid over the
body-warmed cotton of his shirt with a delicate hiss, up and down and in small
circles until he realized that she was attempting to comfort him. Save him from
some perceived misery. Eileen was insightful like that. Eileen was beautiful
like that.
He turned
to her and did his very best to hold her gaze. “Yeah.”
Her
forehead touched his when she sat up. He let out a tiny breath that he hoped
wasn’t quite so heavy with feeling as it felt, and tried not to close his eyes.
“Eileen,”
came his brittle, upturned sound. Eileen smiled a smile that hurt to watch, and
laughed thickly at his inadvertent nuzzle to the bridge of her nose before she
kissed him.
Letters
began to seep out from under the door. An A, a Q. I missed you. It’s been
forever. No; don’t think in terms of forever. Don’t think in terms. We’ve been
here a long time. We’ve been here a thousand years.
Some time
later Henry laid his cheek between Eileen’s breasts and thought that Walter had
probably been watching her for years after his death.
---
Henry
traveled.
“You honestly believe a moronic
thing like that? That we’re dead? And that comes easy to you? No
way. Forget it. Just forget it. Now give me my goddamn gun back before I actually
kill you.”
---
“You just
left me again the other day! Don’t you like me, Henry? …Don’t you like girls?
Oh, hey. Guess what I found.”
---
“I
c-c-couldn’t’ve as-asked for more.”
---

He couldn’t
bring himself to go into the Water Prison. If he had, all he would’ve found was
Andrew DeSalvo in the basement kitchen, struggling eternally against the sword
through his diaphragm.
---
The Lynch
and King Street lines were running. They just didn’t go to Lynch or King. The
first time Henry followed Cynthia, they emerged from a staircase that should
never have been there, rooted into the cold earth, leveling off in the thick of
trees and light autumn fog. The highway up above advertised Silent Hill, three
miles west. They didn’t go any further; Henry thought he would go insane with
loneliness.
Taking the
other line brought him to what he could only assume was Pleasant River. Cynthia
did not accompany him.
But Walter
was there. His dark shape sat perched in the distance atop a small campus hall,
legs dangling boylike over the edge of the roof. Henry would have turned back,
should have, and could not. Walter’s coat was gone. It embraced Eileen’s
shoulders back there in the place he just managed to call home.
“Eileen
wanted me,” Henry said, “to tell you to come back soon.”
Walter said
nothing. Henry let out a soundless breath, half-pivoted, then stopped at the
sound of his voice.
“Ei-leen.”
The
Pleasant River campus was situated oddly in the midst of a field of golden-gray
nothing-grass. Apparently it was the only thing in the town that Walter had
ever deemed at all valuable, because the buildings jutted from the earth like
monoliths in an otherwise barren landscape. The subway stairs descended
awkwardly into the depths of a hillside some ways behind him.
And it was still and silent as a
vacuum, and its stillness wanted to pull the flesh off Henry’s bones and toward
the heavy gravitational center that was Walter on the rooftop. Henry shuffled
in place a few minutes more while he waited for Walter to finish his thought.
When it didn’t come, he allowed his legs to carry him a bit closer to the
building.
Walter wore
a black shirt.
“Mother.”
“Walter,”
Henry interjected carefully. “Do you really think that—”
“I didn’t
understand,” Walter said, continuing as though he hadn’t heard Henry at all,
“what it meant for her to be The Mother Reborn. I thought it was something
different.”
“Walter,”
Henry tried again. Walter’s words were slow, gentle, and a little laudatory.
Like they always were.
“But it’s
not. Mother is awake now. She doesn’t live in the room anymore, though. She
lives in Eileen.”
Henry
thought the air had gotten thicker in the last minute or so, somehow. He turned
and looked back to the subway entrance, as though to make sure it was still
there.
“Maybe that
makes you my father.”
Henry
froze. A sick dread crawled its fingers up his gut and into his throat, and he
turned back to find Walter’s dark shape on the ground, silhouetted against the
brownstone.
“Do you
think so?” he asked, faintly. He felt cold, threatened, a vague recollection of
that twisting and mutilated almost-corpse spasming brokenly from the apartment
lobby ceiling bubbling up and over in the haze of his long-neglected memory.
“Do you know
what Eileen told me, Henry?”
Henry tried
to take a step back but found he couldn’t. They stood close enough to touch
now, and Henry believed that although Walter couldn’t kill him, he could still
inflict a considerable amount of pain without the fond, old comfort of death
lying in wait beyond that threshold.
“What?” he
asked in hopeless wonder. Walter’s expression was calm and vacant and
terrifying.
“She told
me to be nice.”
He knew
that Walter knew. He didn’t know how or when or why, but he knew that he knew.
Had to have known, to say such awful things.
Eileen
wanted them to make peace. Eileen wanted them to get along. A caduceus,
the two of them together: two snakes wound around her unyielding and tireless
radiance, grasping with hungry mouths for her wings.
Henry lowered his head for a time,
and then opened his mouth to speak.
---
“Henry,”
said Cynthia. “This isn’t a dream, is it?”
---
Eileen
sitting on her bed, white light streaking through the window in bands around
her messy hair. An indeterminable but lengthy stretch of time had passed by and
away in this place, or so Henry believed, but her hair had always stayed the
same, hadn’t ever strayed an inch past her chin. He thought now, in his madder
moments, that he had still only just arrived. The broad and abominable temporal
floodplain called death; a lonesome space called maybe but perhaps not so.
---

Eileen
stroking the top of Walter’s hand while Henry looked away to the purple dress
on the floor of her open wardrobe, looking for all the world that it had never
been worn. All he wanted was to touch it and touch it in the way Eileen did
Walter, because he could never be so cruel as to ask her to put it on again.
---
Eileen
underneath him, murmurs and pleased sighs floating out from some arcane place
inside her, gripping his hips with white thighs and arching again and again and
again.
---
Eileen and
Walter fucking, he thought, in that graceful way they had about them.
---
Eileen.
---
Eileen
smiling with a sleepy benevolence from the chair on the other side of her cold
bedroom, naked under Walter’s coat, watching from over her tucked-up knees as
Walter swallowed Henry down like his body was devoid of substance, made of
nothing. Walter, obedient Walter, deadly focused Walter…
---
Henry
exhaling hotly against Eileen’s soft shoulder, gaze locked on the juncture of
her body and Walter’s body, right hand working just within his field of vision
below. Eileen tried to encompass everything and everyone, nails with their
chipped polish scratching softly in his hair. It was then that Henry paused to
wonder just who they were anymore, where, and why.
---
Henry,
pressed under the crushing weight of forever and slowly breaking.
---
Walter
laboring atop Henry laboring atop Eileen. Henry believed the man happy for the
first time ever, then ceased to believe just as quickly, then wondered what had happened to make him so secretly bitter.

---
Henry with
a broad palm on his waist and breasts against his back and his face buried in
his own hands, lying in an aberrant knot of limbs as mother, father, son. He
squashed an abrupt wave of nausea with a brutality he didn’t know he was
capable of, curled up a little tighter, and tried his very best to pretend he
didn’t think he’d lose his mind one day.
---
Walter
slept. Eileen woke and touched Henry. Henry woke and thought he might be okay.
Walter woke.

~fin
- 1
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Ghost Town