Sometimes, he needs a moment to reflect.
He sits on the wall, one knee drawn up to his chest, both of his arms wrapped around the lower part of his leg. He desperately wants to close his eyes, as if that might block out the images in his mind, but he does not allow himself to – the radio is mercifully silent, for once, but he knows that it would still be unspeakably foolish to let his guard down here.
There are streaks of blood on the pavement opposite him. He wonders – although he tries not to think about these things for too long – whether it is his own, or whether it was one of those creatures, or perhaps one of the bodies that he has seen lying around the town of Silent Hill.
He has already started to find it almost normal, he realises with some concern. Normal to raise the handgun – he never even touched a gun before he came here, never thought he’d need to – and fire at the lurching figures that constantly torment him. Normal to see a dead man (lying dead and bleeding and in too-familiar clothes, blond hair and green jacket and static on the television) and calmly search his body for a key.
The cold fog rolls unrelentingly around the lower part of the wall, and he watches it in silence. He wonders, detachedly, whether the fog has ever lifted since he arrived in the town. He tries to remember whether it was always like this – a cursed town of empty streets, broken doors, derelict buildings.
No... no, that isn’t right. He was here before, wasn’t he? With – with Mary. Here, in the town... but it wasn’t like this. It was – different. It – the town – it was beautiful then.
(she was beautiful then. she was beautiful and she was perfect and)
He remembers their day on the lake, and for almost the first time since entering the town he smiles slightly – just a slight upward twitch of the lips, but almost as soon as it has appeared it is gone.
Mary...
James tries to stay alert. He tries to stay alert, but in the end he can’t help pressing his forehead into his knee, and giving out a quiet, strangled sob. |
