Fuck This Town

I. Brookhaven Hospital - Nightmare

The air raid sirens fade slowly, but the transformation has only just begun. The dull dirty walls of the hospital soften, growing pinker and wetter until they glisten with mucus. The plaster becomes fleshy, webbed with red, bulbous veins. The walls and floor shift rhythmically, like the hospital itself is breathing.

There’s a loud, slick, sucking sound, like the clash of metal and flesh. Down the fleshy hall, an odd figure staggers. It limps awkwardly, trying to run, and as it comes closer, it becomes clear: it’s some bastardization of a nurse from the world’s most terrifying porn video. Its classic sexy nurse outfit is spattered with new and old blood. Its breasts, spilling out of its top, are gray with veins of black rot eating away at its skin. It wears red stiletto high-heels, and one heel has snapped, causing its uneven gait. But worst is its face: some twisted mass of twitching flesh, like someone had twisted a clay model of a human face until it was nothing more than a twister fixed in skin and bone.

As it passes anyone, it swings a scalpel at them, but it doesn’t stop running. It makes little noises, panicked noises muted by its own lack of mouth as it runs further and further down the hall.

Then, from the direction it came from, the noise of metal and flesh stops. In the shadows, there’s a hulking beast of a man with a massive pyramid-shaped helmet on its head, forcing its back to stoop, and a blade as long as a human body drags behind it. An apron that almost looks like it’s made of human skin drapes loosely around its hips, and now, the tip of the pyramid helmet is pointing at you.

It seems that the beast has found new prey.

II. Toluca Lake - Daytime

Something is up with the water.

The waves have picked up like there’s a storm, but there’s no wind or rain. Bodies wash up on the beach. More and more bodies with every passing hour, piled on top of each other. They’re remarkably well-preserved considering their age, though their flesh is swollen with water and their eyes are milky white. They’re bodies of all ages, from babies to the elderly, and they’re dressed from all times. One body with jeans. Another with a bonnet. Another in traditional Abanaki deerskin. Another in water-slick pleather.

The bodies stink of fish and rot, and they may be poisoning the lake water. And out of the corner of people’s eyes, sometimes they can see the eyes of the dead moving. Fixing on them. But of course whenever they’re looked at directly, their eyes stare at nothing, unseeing.

Crows settle on the bodies, picking at them, but the birds are silent as the town.

II. Midwich Elementary School - Daytime

Someone has vandalized the front of the school with red spray paint. In childish handwriting, someone has written,

Where is Steven, Mommy? He can’t play and I’m sad.
You mustn’t ask, my darling—Steven has been bad.

Billy too, and Sally? Did they do something wrong?
I’m afraid it’s true, child—all your friends are gone.

On the street, someone has carefully lain out elementary-sized school uniforms. Little blue shirts and skirts and pants and shoes, lined up in a row, like a child is going to run up and wear them any moment. But these uniforms are all wrong. Some are covered in dirt, like whoever wore them took a dirt bath. Some are cut up at every joint and covered in blood. Some are soaking wet and stink like the bodies at the beach. And perhaps oddest still, some seem entirely untouched. Still neat, still pressed, still ready to be worn.

I. Lakeview Hotel - Nightmare

The air raid sirens fade slowly, but the transformation has only just begun. The snow, instead of disappearing as usual, just falls faster. The lake outside has frozen over, and hands from below push up against the thick layer of ice forming on the water. Inside, frost begins to unfurl along the walls and the floor, stiffening the rugs and linens and creeping into your bones.

Throughout the hotel, the sound of crying can be heard. It’s the kind of crying that sets one’s teeth on edge, that brings tears to their own eyes, that haunts all witnesses’ dreams for fear that they might have cause to cry like that too one day. The crying that comes only from the ragged depths of a broken heart, the cry of a person who just learned their loved one is dead, the cry of a person who’s trapped in a moment and can’t imagine moving on.

Following the crying, there’s a woman lying on the frosted rug of the lobby. Her dark hair is frozen, stuck to her frozen white dress. Fern frost has crawled across her back, across her skirt, sticking her legs to the ground. She doesn’t seem to care. She just keeps crying, bowed low on her knees with her head in her arms.

“My baby… my baby… my baby…”

But as soon as she hears a sound, she turns to look at it, revealing her face… or lack thereof. What should have been her face is a mottled mass of twitching flesh, raw and throbbing with every sob. Her large, round belly is covered in blood that flowers across her abdomen and down her thighs. She forces herself to her feet, the skin of her gray knees stripped off by the ice on the ground, but she doesn’t seem to mind.

“My baby… my baby…”

She staggers towards any intruders, her arms outstretched, frozen fingers ready to grasp and hold and freeze anyone unfortunate enough to be touched.

II. Lutheran Church - Daytime

It seems like the conflict in the cult has escalated. Outside the former Lutheran Church, someone has nailed five human heads to the door. Three women, two men. The cuts at the neck are ragged, like someone used a dull knife. Some have prison tattoos. Most seem like they would have been normal people, and most have horrified expressions on their face even as they dangle from these nails, their hair tied off to them.

Using red spray paint, someone has sprayed under this grisly display, BACK OFF.

Is this message for the tourists? For the sect of the cult that uses the church? Either way, whoever it is means business, and the air seems too hot to be comfortable despite the fact that it’s snowing everywhere else in the town.

III. Grand Market - Daytime

All the produce here has long since rotted. It’s past the points of stench or maggots—now a fine, web-like black mold has overtaken the remains of the fruit and vegetables, odorless and yet growing a little more with every passing hour.

One would think that all living creatures had lost interest in this place… but apparently not.

Crows perch in neat rows on every stall. They watch all visitors silently. As any visitor moves, their heads shift as one to follow, eyes like black gemstones and always watching.

Maybe it’s the murder of birds, or maybe it’s just the atmosphere of the town, but there is a very heavy sensation of being watched here.

I. Midwich Elementary School - Nightmare

The echoes of the air raid sirens only faded out a few minutes ago, and the world left behind is treacherous. The floor has rotted in random places, as if the building is trying to trap the unwary foot. Cold water, rusty brown and stinking, drips from the ceilings, forming slick little oily puddles. Words like W H O R E and D E M O N and W I T C H -- and those are the mild insults -- have somehow been carved into the walls from about the top of a child's reach all the way to the floor. They overlap and crowd each other, some gouged deep, some more shallow.

And worse, there's the sound of something dragging dragging over the hardwood in one of the rooms. A peek into the keyhole reveals an unnaturally pale child, dressed in a pinafore, with what remains of riot of greasy blond curls all caught up in ponytails. Chunks of her hair are missing, as if they've been torn out. Her skin is fishbelly white, though there are dark patches of what might be rot dotting her arms and legs. One of her hands twitches at seeming random, fingers clenching over nothing.

The other holds a rusty breadknife.

As if sensing eyes upon her, she turns. She no longer has a lower lip, but her upper lip curves in a smile, and she lunges for the door, her hand twitching on the grip of her knife.

She snarls as she moves, grunting curses -- reciting the insults carved into the walls like a litany -- as if moving quickly hurts her. Despite her pain, she's rattling at the doorknob in just seconds.

II. Bookstore - Daytime

Even despite the heavy snow, light streams in through the bookstore's shattered windows. Somebody had once laid a fire in the center of the bookstore's floor, if the ashes and half-burnt books are any evidence. That wasn't all they did: they arranged all the hardbound volumes into the word H E L P.

That's an easy thing to ignore. Perhaps less easy to ignore: every single copy of Faustus -- of which there are at least twenty; it would seem the shop owner needed several copies for each edition they bought -- have been dragged out and left open to what the dragger evidently thought were relevant passages. They scribbled out two pages entirely, covering them with two words in thick black ink: NO DEALS. No deals, no deals, no deals, they are evidently insisting.

Don't make deals with demons? Help me not to make deals with demons? Just what the person here before was thinking isn't clear. What is clear is that they were serious about it, and possibly a wizard: the longer you hold a book, the more it seems to vibrate in your hands. And if you drop or move a book, it will return to its previous place. Is a poltergeist in the room, or is this a spell?

Does it matter which?

III. Jack's Inn - Daytime

The Nightmare is finally over, and in the east, the sun has at last begun to peek over the horizon. The brightest stars still glow in a sky that shifts from deep, velvety blue to purple to pink, streaked with gold. Fog rises from the condensation on the grass, and the dim light makes the snow shine with a diffuse glow.

If this wasn't Silent Hill, it would be a beautiful morning. As it is, anybody who's spent more than five minutes here should know that something awful's about to happen.

The worst the town has apparently decided to throw at its 'tourists' is a heap of dead rabbits, all killed neatly, laid on a tarp on the inn's lawn. Closer inspection of the rabbits -- if you have the stomach for it -- reveals that they all had their throats cut or their necks snapped. No messy gunshot wounds here.

The intrepid hunter left the very simplest of messages to explain themself: they wrote hi on the tarp. Underneath the word is an old-fashioned smiley face, the kind inside the circle.

It's certainly possible this is a threat. It's equally possible that this is what passes for a friendly greeting in Silent Hill.