Archive of Our Own

In the dream, James is standing at the end of the world.

Or so it seems to him, the cracked and broken asphalt beneath his feet abruptly dropping away after a few scant inches into cold air. Vague, straight-edged shadows to either side merely suggest, without entirely confirming, the presence of buildings somewhere beneath the thick, pervasive blue-gray fog that blankets his twilit surroundings, smothering any hint of light, sound, or movement. Like a bridal veil, he thinks, without quite knowing why; this gloomy atmosphere, bereft of any joy or life, is certainly no place for a wedding. More like a funeral shroud. 

James takes a shuffling half-step forward and nearly gasps as his shoe scrapes over the paved road, the grating sound seeming to cut through the air like a serrated knife. His sharp intake of breath, too, rings loud in his ears, before he clamps his teeth over it in order to muffle the noise as much as possible. (A separate part of him wonders then, in a detached, abstract way, just what it is that he has to be so quiet for, with not a soul around; but in a moment the question passes, drifting from memory and mind, as such thoughts in dreams so often do.) He clicks on the flashlight in his jacket pocket and carefully leans out over the precipice, but the light fails to penetrate the thick fog, only refracting off the gently eddying surface and scattering a thousand different ways. James turns the flashlight off again, but it makes no difference: the chasm’s bottom, and whatever lies on the far side, is lost to view.

He just stands there then, at first letting his eyes adjust back to the dim, ambient lighting – the sun? Here? But why was it so cold? – then relaxing his gaze further, idly following the gradient of mist and shadow from the dusky, almost bluish smoke near the top of the ravine, losing its color even as it deepened in shade further below, until it became…not quite black, exactly, but a deep, stormy hue a few steps removed. If he squints, James can almost fancy that he’s peering down instead on water, a strange river whose currents have broken beyond the border dividing lake and shore to flow, ceaselessly, here. It’s peaceful, almost. But it doesn’t change the fact that he can’t go any further.

From somewhere behind him, a different noise, uncannily familiar, like an old forgotten tune heard on the radio. It sounds like birdsong. It sounds like a woman crying.

James doesn’t move (outside of, perhaps, a tensing in his limbs; a furrowing of his brows). He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t turn around, because he knows, the way one just innately knows things in dreams sometimes on a bone-deep level, that behind him is the worst thing in the world. 

Then the noise stops, and James’s heart goes with it. (This is a dream, and in a dream two opposing thoughts can be held simultaneously in the mind’s eye. The worst thing in the world is behind him; the worst thing in the world is gone. The same thought, run twice.) So he turns around to find it again and

freezes, mouth falling open not so much in horror as in sheer bewilderment at the shambling, faceless thing which has straggled through the fog to find him. And he doesn’t have time to even scream before the monster thrusts itself grotesquely forward, close enough to touch – close enough to kiss – close enough to fall into his arms – and spews a torrent of liquid bile directly in James’s face. 

So rather than screaming, James lets out a choked moan and falls, coughing and wheezing for air, to his hands and knees, sending puffs of dust whirling through the dry air of this empty, ruined house. He scrabbles a bit at the floorboards, helplessly, barely conscious of anything besides the acrid burning sensation that clogs his nose, his mouth, his throat, like a tide of bitter regrets swallowed for years and now coming back up all at once. 

Through a bleary haze, he descries the shuffling gait of the spitting monster, clumping awkwardly on, of all things, a set of grimy platform boots. James makes a wild grab for its filth-encrusted leg, hoping he can pull himself up or at the very least take the thing down to his level; but his fingers dig in where they shouldn’t, catching on flesh that isn’t flesh and piercing the skin, drawing blood that spurts in disproportion to the wound and makes his hand slip, red-slicked, back to the floor. 

For a long, pulsing second that drags on far longer than it should, James can only stare at his hand in horror. The monster’s blood is red. So red. His hand is coated with it and it’s warm. Sticky. Was it actually –? Was he actually –?

Then the monster lets out a keening wail that is both discordant and, somehow, pitiful, like the cry of a dumb animal. Distracted, instinctively, James turns his head towards the sound – and his vision fills with hot and stinking bile.

Then there’s only pain; and James is used to that.

Flesh sears; skin sloughs away, dissolves; but for one moment, just before he loses his sight entirely, James peers into the quivering, throbbing hole above him – peers into, and past it. And there, as though witnessing the end of a long hallway (or the light at the end of the tunnel), James finally sees the monster’s face.

He dies smiling.

(Next time, James is quicker to turn around.

Next time, some buried instinct stops him from opening his mouth to scream.

Next time, he rips an old rotten plank from the window and takes a swing –

His hands stay red after that.)

In the dream, James is trying to buy flowers.

“No,” he says after some thought, in reply to the shop clerk’s question, “I don’t think it matters what kind of flowers they are. Just as long as they’re nice to look at.”

“Dla kogo mają być kwiaty?” the young woman behind the counter asks, but James either doesn’t hear the question or doesn’t choose to respond, intent as he is on two bright bundles that have caught his eye.

“Something pure and graceful, like those.” He points to an arrangement of white roses, each petal almost luminescent in the shop. “But they also need to be… healthy. Alive. You know? Like these ones.” His finger shifts to another bouquet of roses that are an almost lurid red, darkly radiant in their own way. James’s gaze flickers between the two for a moment, before he nods to himself and turns back to the shop clerk. “Okay,” he says. “I’d like a bouquet of red and white flowers, please.”

The clerk’s frown is sympathetic, but also a little nervous. “Odradzałabym...to przynosi pecha,” she says, hesitantly.

James furrows his brows. “Huh?” he says.

“Czerwony i biały razem przynoszą pecha,” explains the clerk. “Krew i bandaże, wie pan? Zapowiedź śmierci.” At James’s expression, which is steadily growing more puzzled, she adds helpfully, “Proszę się nie martwić, wystarczy, że dodamy jakiś inny kolor. Może coś zielonego? Oznaka nowego życia i nadziei.”

But the woman’s hopeful expression fades as James shakes his head. “I – I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.” Before she can speak, James adds, “Look, I really need to get going if I don’t want to be late. Can I come by later to pick up the flowers? The red and white ones.” He digs through his pockets, unearthing a few crumpled bills which he drops on the counter. “That should be enough, I think. I only want one bouquet.”

“Ale...chwila! Proszę pana!” the shop clerk cries, but James is already turning, already passing rows of floral greenery that wilt and yellow when he walks by them, already reaching out a hand to open the 

apartment door, and it swings inward with barely a nudge.

A stab of icy panic briefly pierces through James at the muted whisper of static which seems to creep ever so slightly closer; but the sound emanates not from his pocket but the room just beyond. Not exactly promising, but still better than the alternative. And as he shoulders past the creaking door into the dim and dank apartment, his eye catches on light from further within, and that old blind foolish hope flares up in him once more, just as it has every time he stumbles into a room that holds some sign of (ordinary, human) life: Maybe that’s her? Maybe she –

But James slows after two or three steps when he sees just an empty armchair and an old television set, inexplicably tuned to a dead channel. He takes a slow, deep breath, trying to stifle his (crazy crazy you’re crazy) disappointment, and when that doesn’t work he allows prudence and vigilance to take over, searching through kitchen cabinets and drawers for stray supplies, then sidling through a smaller door to the adjoining room, which is entirely empty aside from an antique grandfather clock and scratch marks peppering the walls. After a moment’s glance, James is ready to shrug this off as yet another oddity in a long line of them, but when he begins to turn, the light from his flashlight glimmers strangely over the surface of the clock. He turns back to the clock face, then approaches to examine it further, broken glass crunching underfoot.

Someone has smashed the glass overlay of the clock face. Inside, three harsh gouges point to three different numbers on the clock: 2, 3, 9.

James frowns, puzzled. Who would do this? And why? It must have been important to them, important enough to break the clock open and risk damaging the delicate machinery within. But the clock is broken regardless – it has no hands. Or could it be…?

He reaches into a pocket, pulls out the apartment map he’d swiped from the downstairs lobby, and on the back sketches out an approximation of the clock’s three scars. It doesn’t click until he squints again at the clock face and notices that the markings are all of different sizes. Of course – it’s telling the time. Which, based on the length of the makeshift “hands”, is…

(“Time of death: 9:10 A.M. and fifteen seconds…”)

…is…

(“Mister Sutherland, I'm afraid your wife…”)

…

(I'm afraid – )

There’s a meshwork of shallower scratches overlaying the three deeper furrows now, flecked with rust-red. When did that happen?

James blinks dully at the clock face, then (finally noticing the raw ache in his fingers that throbs in time with his heartbeat) glances down at his hands. His nails are torn and splintered; a few have dried blood caked in under the nail beds. Oh, he thinks, and then he doesn’t think of it any more.

A harsh buzz of static echoes (in his head) in the next room, and suddenly James is standing again in the room with the television set, only now it’s showing him a ghost, in grainy black-and-white.

Through the television, the ghost smiles at him and says, good-naturedly teasing, “Are you taping again? Come on.”

It actually knocks the wind out of him to hear her voice, and he staggers forward, the back of the chair catching him before he falls – though even this is a happy accident rather than any calculated move on James’s part. Shaking, stumbling, he manages to skirt around the chair before his legs lose their ability to support him altogether and he collapses back into the cushions. (They might be damp; they might be moldy; they might be crawling with generations of spiders that have born, made their nests, and died in that armchair. James, who has not blinked or looked away from the television screen since it came back to life, doesn’t care.)

“I don’t know why,” says the ghost, now turned away from James, “but I just love it here. It’s so peaceful.”

“Look back at me, Mary,” James says through numb lips. “Please. Let me see you again.”

The ghost obliges, smiling once more, and James lets out a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob as she continues, “You know what I heard? This whole area used to be a sacred place.” (“It was, with you,” murmurs James.) “I think I can see why.” The ghost turns her face away again, chin on one hand, and lets out a small sigh before wistfully adding, “It’s too bad we have to leave.”

“Don’t leave,” says James, faintly. “We won’t –”

“Please promise you’ll take me again, James,” the ghost interrupts, standing now. James opens his mouth to tell her Yes, I did, I do, I promise, but the words don’t come out before the ghost seems to curl in on itself, the videotape static almost (but not quite) concealing the sound of a delicate, dry cough. Then the image begins to flicker and – 

Shadows dance across James’s features. His face is very still. He remains, until the television fades back into muted snowy disorder, completely and utterly silent. Then, very carefully, he reaches one hand down to the waistband of his jeans, still-raw fingers finding cool steel under a faux-wood finish. He squeezes the grip firmly, and raises the handgun to touch the barrel against his temple. 

It feels like a kiss, he thinks, just before pulling the trigger.

(This only happens once. Later, when James returns to this room, the corpse is slumped over in the armchair, face so bloody and mangled it looks hardly human. And the grandfather clock is silent, and the radio speaks not at all; and on the television set there’s nothing but dead air, dead sky, dead fog.)

In the dream, James stands in the doorway of a small, dark room, staring at a big, dark hole in the ground, afraid to step forward and afraid to step back, because the worst thing in the world is still behind him and now it's getting closer.

There is no light. There is no way to (face it) fight back. The only way forward is down, but all he can do is look at it, stricken, head nearly spinning with vertigo, indecision, fear. Here, at the end of everything, James Sunderland is above all things a coward – same as it ever was.

Then a hand reaches out from just behind him to grasp his shoulder, a gentle loving touch that even through his jacket James can feel is cold and clammy and dead, dead, dead. In his ear, a voice (warbled – waterlogged – smothered –) murmurs: “Darling.”

James screams and jerks away, but the motion sends him off-balance, over the edge of the precipice – his heart thumps once, agonizing, in his chest – and he has just enough time to think, Did she follow me or did I drag her down with me? before everything dissolves in darkness.

Sometimes, Angela is already dead when he finds her – a small limp form in white that gives him a disconcerting feeling of deja vu to look upon, curled up on her side by a grave or by a mirror. 

Sometimes Angela is dead, and then she is alive again. This tends to be rather confusing for both of them.

(“Lost?” Angela asks him, incredulous, almost disbelieving. “But...you're from here, aren't you? How can you be lost?”

“I'm – not,” says James. “I'm just…visiting, for awhile.”

Or: “Well, I'm not from here, my – my wife was.”

Or: “You can still be lost even in the place you're from, can't you?” And maybe it's the edge of desperation in his voice, or just the fog light glinting off his eyes, but Angela offers a tiny nod at this, in recognition of a kindred spirit.)

Sometimes James watches Angela die – only that's not quite the case. He doesn't watch. He's just there when it happens, a quicksilver flash that hangs suspended in the air before her face floods red and, instinctively, he flinches away. After that, he doesn't look at her (the body that used to be her) again.

(Once, he tries to follow Angela up the burning stairs, because she seems so sure – of why she's here, where she's meant to go. He keeps going even when he loses sight of her shadow in the smoke, until his jacket is charred and black and his skin sears and his eyes are full of ash and he has to turn back, knowing that his world is not meant to end in fire. He braces himself for the descent, but when he looks down he sees that he has climbed only two steps.)

James never lies to her. He’s tempted to, sometimes. More for the sake of her happiness than his own. But they each have their own allotment of Hell, here, and though the boundaries between the two might get – distorted – occasionally, he doesn’t see that as a reason to inflict torment on (someone who doesn’t deserve it) (someone who’s been punished enough), even the banal, well-intentioned kind. Maybe she even thinks the same thing, looking at him.

When he finds it, he always keeps her knife.

It’s cold, down in the meat locker – an artificial, clean sort of cold, different altogether from the heavy, damp fog outside. Outside, thinks James, and an almost hysterical laugh threatens to bubble up within him. By all rights, he should be miles underground now; what meaning did terms like “outside” and “inside” have any more? It was all the same. It was all Silent Hill. 

But the freezing air puts him in mind, bizarrely, of another journey down and down and down into the earth: the Divine Comedy, the Inferno. James had read it for some introductory college course, and while most of the work had gone right over his head, one striking image always stood out in his mind: the bottom of Hell, which held not a fiery pit but a frozen lake of near-infinite span, buffeted constantly by icy wind. That was where the worst sinners were sent – those who committed betrayal – their souls forever trapped within the unyielding ice. It was cold, James remembered, because the Devil was trapped there too, mad and mindless, always straining his manifold wings to escape, never realizing that it was precisely these wingbeats which made the air so frigid and ensured his eternal imprisonment.

But James is no Dante (though he could have considered himself so once – seeking, stumbling, losing the straight way, searching for his departed Beatrice in a special place), and there is no Virgil here to guide him. In fact, there’s nobody here at all – which, after everything he’s been through to get this far, is something of a relief.

Then a metallic click echoes directly behind him, and James nearly jumps out of his skin, whirling around with his hands already half-raised to protect him from –

“Oh!” says James, some (but not all) of the tension bleeding out of him. “Eddie. It – it’s just me.” His eyes flicker from Eddie’s (bloodshot, bleary, some unidentifiable emotion hiding behind them that makes James uneasy) down to the antique revolver in Eddie’s hand, which is currently pointed at James’s chest, then quickly back to Eddie. “Sorry, I…didn’t mean to scare you.”

Eddie squints, instantly suspicious. The barrel of the revolver rises maybe half an inch, but James isn’t certain because he is trying very, very hard to not look at the revolver whatsoever right now. “Then what are you following me around for? Huh?”

“I-I haven’t been trying to follow you,” stammers James. “I’m just…trying to get out of here. Same as you.”

Eddie considers this, head tilting to one side. “Is that right?” he says, slowly. James nods (maybe a tad frenetically), and abruptly Eddie’s mouth begins to quiver, something that’s not quite a smile and not quite a sneer. “Poor James,” mumbles Eddie. “Couldn’t find Laura…couldn’t find – whoever you were looking for…so now he’s stuck with fatass Dumb-browski.”

And maybe it’s the shivering cold, or the dull exhaustion after hours of dread, or just the fact that he’s waded through hordes of inhuman monsters to get here and is now trapped at the wrong end of a gun by a monster who is so utterly, worthlessly, pathetically human – for whatever reason, this is what finally pushes James over the edge.

“Eddie!” James snaps, and the abject surprise in Eddie’s face makes it almost worth it. “What are you talking about? I didn’t come here to find you, I came to find –”

BANG

James collapses, clutching his stomach, feeling warmth leak out through his fingers onto the cold tile. He feels more than hears a set of heavy footsteps approach him, and has just enough cognizance remaining to turn and look up.

“Yeah,” says Eddie, his voice cold and flat as a butcher’s block. “I know.” And the world goes red as a monstrous roar fills the air –

The sound of the metal door slamming shut behind him echoes strangely in the meat locker. James blinks, both at his emergence into unexpected light (artificial though it may be, the fluorescents buzzing like corpseflies in his ear) and at the person he finds there, a round and slouching silhouette that is not only human, but that he actually recognizes. “Eddie?” says James. Then he sees what Eddie is staring at on the ground. “Who is that?” James adds, mostly disgusted but also a little morbidly curious despite himself.

Eddie glances up, almost seeming to struggle to find James with his gaze despite their close quarters. “You…don’t know?” he asks, voice barely above a mutter.

James quickly takes in Eddie’s expression, then the gun in his hand. He doesn’t spare much of a glance for the corpse, whose features have been all but obliterated, rendered into anonymous, gory pulp. He shakes his head mutely, hoping perhaps this will manage to de-escalate –

“You fuckin’ liar,” Eddie growls. 

BANG

James enters the meat locker (BANG) to find Eddie (BANG) emptying his revolver (BANG) into a bloody corpse slumped up against the wall (BANG) with a slow and steady determination. At a break in the firing, James asks, as gently as he can manage, “Eddie…what are you doing?”

Eddie barely reacts to his presence, just turning to look at James, then back to the corpse (its features obscured in blood, bits of gray matter stuck to the collar of its military-green jacket – James’s stomach does a slow roll, his eyes lose a little focus, and after that he decides not to look at the body, or any of the other bodies scattering the room, more than he has to), then back to James. With all the empty-headed bemusement of a child, Eddie says: “What’s it look like I’m doing?”

James comes across strange drawings, sometimes. Not graffiti – God knows there’s plenty of that everywhere – but cartoonish doodles of farmyard animals, daubed in paint or crayon or faded chalk. Usually they’re outside, scrawled on some half-hidden wall, never more than three or four feet off the ground; but every now and then, when he thinks to look, he spots a few in stairwell corners, or decorating the margins of a stray page of sheet music. Recurring figures occasionally crop up: a baby bunny, its grown-up counterpart. A wolf.

He wonders about it; wonders quite a lot, in fact, the question tickling the back of his mind like a toothache he can’t help but probe at. It must be the same instinct that draws him, back and back again, to those strange red squares scattered all over town. A moth to a red flame. A void to a dying man. (A static hiss on the radio: James – come to me – why did you – )

James never finds any trace of the person who left behind these drawings. But that only makes sense – after all, what reason would a child have to come here?

In the dream, James is standing in front of an open grave.

The cemetery is quiet, boxed in by brick walls that incongruously tower over the small plot of land, creating the illusion (what illusion?) that the sky above him is no longer there, only an empty expanse of oblivion. No ostentatious statues or mausoleums dot the rows of graves; just worn markers of stone, overgrown with dead weeds and faded grasses that crackle faintly underfoot. One of the gravestones a few rows back has been adorned with a flat, red square that lights the surroundings with an uncanny glow that is at the same time somehow…familiar? Warm? Inviting? James can’t quite put his finger on it, but it makes him feel almost at peace. 

He could stay here, drift from grave to tranquil grave under the watchful auspices of the steady red light. But he knows that he won’t. He knows it as soon as he treads close enough to the three empty hollows of dirt, all laid out in a line, their monuments newly-carved in stone of fog-gray: ANGELA OROSCO. EDDIE DOMBROWSKI. And sitting at the far end, a third spartan grave marker, utterly ordinary and prosaic: JAMES SUNDERLAND.

James notes this with a bleak sort of acceptance, further confirmation of what he's always known – but there's still something wrong with this picture, something vital, something missing, something…

"Mary," whispers James, like he’s coming up for air. “Mary should be here…where…?” He shifts, scans the graveyard once and then again, but doesn't do much more than that; his feet feel as though they're rooted to the ground. Mary's not here. He already knows she's not here, because if she were then they'd be laying together, side by side. Till death do us –

When James looks back at his grave, it's changed. The flashlight, which had before illuminated an earthen pit the size and depth of a coffin, now reveals a profound, bottomless hole in the world. At first he thinks it’s some sort of optical illusion, a trick of the light or his eyes lying to him, but when he holds his flashlight directly above the hole and looks inside…well, it’s a decent flashlight. The light travels a long way down. And still – still – when it arrives, the darkness is already there, waiting. 

Looking at it makes him sick. Looking at it makes him want to jump. But that was normal, right? Everybody had thoughts like that sometimes. Like when they saw the ground from a high place, or cut themselves shaving with a razor, or watched their wife while she was –

If you really want to see Mary, you should just die, thinks James, the thought seeming to come not from his own mind but somewhere outside him, so abrupt and alien it feels. But he can’t deny that it makes a certain kind of dream-logic sense. Mary is supposed to be dead, but isn’t (can’t be, he – spoke to her? – got a letter?). Mary is supposed to be buried in the ground next to where James (lies, will lie, has lied), but isn’t. Mary is in the hole. The hole is Mary.

James pockets the flashlight, then switches it off for good measure. In its absence, the shadows deepen, and the glow emitted by the gravestone square washes everything in heart's-blood red. But he doesn’t give himself time to doubt, just

steps into the car (after opening the passenger-side door for Maria, like any gentleman would), where Maria is already half-turned towards him, the way she unerringly seems to whenever they’re together. She props her chin on one curled hand, eyes flickering to the backseat as James starts the car.

“You gonna tell me what’s back there?” she asks, crossing her legs in a way that makes the light ripple where it reflects off her skirt. 

James yanks the gearshift into reverse with perhaps more force than is strictly necessary. "Back where?" he says after a beat, easing the car slowly backward.

Maria purses her lips, lets out a soft huff of air that could be a scoff. "You know," she says. "In the backseat." 

"Nothing's back there," says James absently, shifting gears again, eyes on the trees, the road. The car feels like a stranger to him, the texture of the wheel unfamiliar to his fingers, forcing him to concentrate on every minute movement with uncharacteristically intense deliberation. Probably it was the adrenaline finally wearing off, exhaustion quickly moving in to take its place. But that was fine. He just had to get the car around, then it was a straight shot out of here to get on the highway. There must be some cheap motel, some rest stop he could pull over into, not very far from here. What was the name of the place he'd stayed the previous night? Or…would it be two nights ago now? How long had –

“– James," insists a voice in his ear.

"What," James snaps, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Maria nearly recoil. Oddly, rather than chastening him, the tiny movement only deepens his aggravation. She was scared of him now? Really? After defending her from an entire town full of monsters?

A terse second or two of silence pass, enough for James to get the car up to a more satisfying speed, one that should let them leave Silent Hill in the rearview mirror. "You weren't listening to me," says Maria eventually. "I asked you what's in the –"

"And I told you, there's nothing," James cuts her off, still not taking his eyes off the road. "Nothing you need to worry about."

Another pause; then the pink curve of Maria's mouth rises again, in tandem with one eyebrow. "Oh, I see," she says with a throaty chuckle. "A present? For me? You shouldn’t have.” James’s jaw clenches, barely visible, as Maria continues, “You know, if it's meant to be a surprise you can just –"

"What part of 'it's nothing' do you not understand?" Every word in James's mouth tastes like sour bile.

Maria blinks, wide-eyed. She shifts in her seat, a tad uncomfortably. The tires spin and the engine hums. After a time, she reaches a hand over, lays it on James's thigh. He doesn't welcome the touch, but doesn't push it away, either, as she moves her thumb back and forth over the fabric of his jeans. "I was just joking," she says after a time. James can almost swear there's a note of petulance in her voice, and he can't (or doesn't) quite stop himself from letting out a bitter laugh.

"Sure," he says. "Right." Because nothing's serious with you, James doesn't say. Because you're not –

But that thought stops cold as Maria raises her hand from his leg, nails ghosting over his jacket sleeve and shoulder before settling at the nape of his neck. Her fingers are freezing cold. It makes James's skin crawl. “James,” Maria murmurs, and the sound of his name in her mouth almost makes his heart stop. “It’s okay. I know that you’ve been through…a lot. We both have.”

James says, in a voice drained of all emotion, “You don’t know what I’ve been through.”

Maria opens her mouth to argue, but evidently thinks better of it. “That doesn’t matter now,” she says, as gentle as her touch, as candy-sweet as her nail polish. “You’re free. You have me.” She runs her thumb over his jawline. “I’m here for you.”

Slowly, very slowly, the tension bleeds out of James’s bearing. He leans his head into Maria’s touch – her fingers are already starting to warm against his skin – and sitting like this, with his eyes fixed ahead and her face just a soft blur at the edge of his vision, he can almost imagine that the past three years never happened.

Until Maria pulls her hand back and says, her voice sultry and playful, utterly alien and terrifyingly familiar, “So, handsome. Where are you taking me?”

James sighs, the illusion broken. “I don’t know,” he says, wearily. “Whatever motel comes along first, I guess.”

Maria snorts in a distinctly unlady-like fashion. “How very romantic.”

“You have a better suggestion?” James asks, intending to match her dry, sardonic tone (the way they’d been in the hospital, before), but the words emerge icy and brittle instead. 

“Mm. No, I guess not,” says Maria, inspecting her fingernails with a casualness that, James is sure, is affected. “Anything’s better than here, I –” Her words are choked off by a sudden bout of coughing, almost violent in its intensity, and on the steering wheel, James’s knuckles go white.

“Didn’t I tell you to do something about that cough?” he says tightly.

Through hacking spasms, Maria nods an acknowledgement, fighting for breath. “I – I know, James – but – we just left, we –” She waves a hand vaguely, in mute incoherence. Her broken inhalations resound like sirens in the tiny, cramped interior of the car.

His vision is starting to grow gray at the edges, and James doesn’t think it’s just the fog. “Do you want me to pull over?” he says, still in that tight, restrained voice. He had gotten out. God dammit, he had almost gotten out. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She was supposed to –

Maria nods, her face hidden behind a sheaf of bleach-blonde-and-bubblegum hair; and it is at that exact moment that the miniature hand radio (still, after all this time, shoved in James’s front pocket, its blocky frame now so familiar it was hardly noticeable) begins screaming static.

The car screeches to a juddering halt. Inside, just as abruptly as it began, the radio dies, and the only sound is the engine ticking and cooling as James and Maria turn to regard one another.

Maria, for the first time, sees the face of judgment.

James, not for the first time, sees red.

(The next time, when James finds her again in the Labyrinth, he can't quite deny the small frisson of pleasure he gets from seeing her in a cage, and they're able to make something work even on opposite sides of the bars. He stays there until it's no longer enough, and once he leaves his blood won't stop pounding in his ears, metronomic counterpoint to every shot he fires, every blow he lands. Then, when he opens the door to room 208 at last, Maria is there, dead again, dead.

He looks at her body and he does nothing.

He looks at her body and he does nothing.

He looks at her body and –)

In the grayish light cast through the high windows of the hotel room, James reads once more the label on the bottle. White Claudia , it says, the text so faded it’s nearly illegible. This will make it all right. For a special time, a special place.

His palm is clammy against the paper-dry label, and there’s a sick yearning in the bottom of his stomach that feels close to, and at the same time entirely distinct from, the way he’d felt seeing Maria pour him a glass at the bar. But James has the suspicion – partly a nagging, half-recalled memory of a walking tour with Mary, the guide pointing to full white blooms at the water’s edge, but largely based on everything else this town has thrown at him up to now – that drinking this isn’t going to send him on any ordinary bender.

Well, either way, he sure as hell knows he’s not going to be collecting any more sobriety chips after today. “Bottoms up, Alice,” James mutters to himself, before unscrewing the cap and gulping the milky white liquid inside all in one go.

The brown glass bottle drops to the floor, mercifully without shattering, as James nearly collapses into the floral upholstered chair. Static crackles in his ears – not the same kind that he hears on the radio, more like the scratchy sound of an old video recording. But he hadn’t even inserted the tape, yet…had he? Was the television set even turned on?

For a moment he’s left staring blankly at his own reflection in the darkened TV: haggard, exhausted, somehow indefinably warped and strange (an artifact of the antique, curving screen, he hopes). Then there’s another blare of static – a rush of snowy grays and whites – and she’s there, pacing, worrying at her nails absently the way she always would when she was lost in thought, until Mary catches sight of him and snorts and says, “Are you taping again? Come on…”

He’s watched this recording before. (James intuits this immediately, without any fuss, the same way he intuits that this video was made three years ago, even though that should by all rights be impossible.) This was his – their – last moment of pure bliss, unmarred by Mary’s sickness and everything that would come after. And everything plays out exactly as it has a thousand thousand times before: Mary’s bashful, self-conscious smile; walking past the TV (this TV, the same TV he’s looking through right now) to look out the window (the light – the chair on the veranda – the ivy on the terrace – everything now as it was then); telling him, her voice ever so slightly askew of real, distorted by the camera (because a camera could never capture her as she was really), how this used to be a sacred place. 

But the room in the recording is, other than Mary’s presence, identical to the one he sits in now – and the screen takes up his entire view – he can imagine that he’s the James Sunderland who made that videotape, who’s still making that videotape – still a husband, still married, still alive – Those alive there, in the glowing rectangle / lead our true lives! They have not, as we have been / forced to here, cut off their arms and legs – and if he raises his hands before him just right and shuts his eyes, if only for a moment, he can feel that there’s a weight there, metal and bulky and a little cumbersome, because they couldn’t afford a better camera –

“Promise you’ll take me again, James,” Mary asks him softly, her warm gaze somehow penetrating through the medium of the camera to pierce James deep in his soul.

And James, taking a little care, deposits the video camera on a nearby dresser, then turns to the woman beside him. “I promise,” he says, before he envelops her slim frame in his arms. And if his voice rings hollow where hers is soaked in static? If her footfalls make no sound as he moves to take hold of the camera? What of that, what of that? She is here and so is he, and they are going to live forever happy.

“James, honey?” Mary’s voice comes from behind him, as through falling water. “Did something happen to you?” And James comes back to himself then – comes back to where and when he truly is. He turns his head to look again at his wife. 

Her face is etched with blood-black lines, twisting narrow streets. She is clothed in fire and swathed in bloody bandages. A bridal veil sewn from moth wings lies trampled at her feet. Her eyes are fog. Her eyes are black. Her eyes are open doorways.

Distantly, James lets out a small laugh. “No,” he tells her, “it’s fine.” He considers the camera once more, considers looking again at Mary (not Mary) through the viewfinder, idly wondering what exactly he will see there, knowing that it would never make a difference. “Everything is fine.”

The television flickers to static, then shuts off. In the reflection of the screen, there is no one sitting in the floral upholstered chair. All is as it once was, and will be again.

(And, in another place: James takes a shaking, trembling step, then another, to approach the thing that was – is – his wife. He cups her shadowy face in the palms of his hands and feels rising spires puncture into flesh, cards his fingers through the spools of rusted wire that are her hair. Looking into her eyes, he asks: “Were you waiting? For me?”

When she smiles, her teeth are all the forgotten gravestones he has left behind in dreams. “James,” says Silent Hill. “I’ve always been waiting for you.”

She closes the distance between them, and when James kisses her it tastes like lake water, like a knife blade, like rot. And as he is put together and torn apart, over and over again, he smiles – because he is here, and so is she, and they are going to live forever. Happy.)

He has been in Silent Hill for a long, long time now.

Long enough for all his weapons to crumble into rust. (The pipe is easy to replace, but the guns aren't, and so he's grown accustomed to battling at close range, feeling the shudder run down his arms when he deals a killing blow.) Long enough to scavenge and use every health drink and dirty needle this town has to offer, and resort instead to wrapping his wounds – his hands and face the most frequent targets – in soiled, makeshift bandages. Long enough that he's left his old clothes behind, after enough scrabbling mannequin legs and splashes of rotting acid have all but disintegrated them. (He's left behind, too, much of what he's carried with him, and it's been so long now that he doesn't remember what it really was any more, except a burning, yearning desire to – to what? Punish, or be punished? They are one and the same.)

He's found that he doesn't exactly need to eat any longer, but he does sometimes anyway, catching moths out of the air just so he can still remember what it's like to taste, to feel disgust. It hurts a little more each time he opens his mouth, the muscles sore from lack of use. There’s nobody here to talk to, not even himself, and he stopped screaming long ago. So he spends the days (a word that has no meaning to him) haunting the decrepit, ruined halls of a forgotten place deep in the ground, and when he finds other not-living things, he destroys them without mercy. (He feels as though he can recollect a time when he didn’t have to hunt, to chase them down; quite the other way around, in fact.)

There used to be another, he thinks, different from these twitching, faceless creatures. An iron lattice grille, a bleeding red door. But the passages move always beneath his feet, the walls fester and moan, and the only map to this place now is the one inside his head, which was never very reliable to begin with. He forgets. He remembers. He forgets. Memories pour out of him like a leaking well; and, like a well, he draws from older, deeper sources to refill him. He wraps more bandages around his skull to block out the most insidious whispers, protects it inside a makeshift wooden frame. It feels right, somehow, to be bound.

It is in the nature of labyrinths to force one to travel a single, unbroken path, making many turns before inevitably finding oneself at the center, where the minotaur resides. What is a minotaur? What is a labyrinth? he wonders. It takes some time for him to realize that the labyrinth is here, the labyrinth is home. But he only discovers what the minotaur is when he finally, finally reaches the center, crosses the threshold, steps through the red iron door.

Beyond, all is metal and rust, a butcher’s sanctum. Fan blades spin slowly overhead, bathing the room in darkness, then red. Silver glints along the edge of one bloodstained, dripping table: rows of surgeon’s scissors, carefully arrayed. On top of the table lies a thing of great and terrible beauty, clean and cold and sharp. He steps closer to inspect the thing and realizes after a bit of time that it is a massive blade, edge kept meticulously sharp, dark handle wrapped in white cloth. The flat slab of the blade’s hilt ends in a huge, iron bolt bigger than his hand, where it was once conjoined with its mirror twin. 

He flexes his bandaged hands once, twice, steels himself, then grabs the haft in two fists – and it is heavy, it is heavy, but that is only right. He will be able to use it, when he needs to. For now, he holds the blade at an angle behind him, its tip scraping against the ground as he turns to depart this place.

The door is gone. 

Somehow, this is not very surprising to him. The blade squeals as he slowly turns about the room, considering. When the solution comes to him, he could almost laugh, if only he remembered how. Hefting the blade in both hands, his muscles tense before he makes a massive, overhead swing –

He carves his path forward, as he always has, as he always will, with a knife.

He will leave this place, go down to the water’s edge and beyond. He will arrive on strange misty shores and climb broken steps to a sandstone church shrouded by trees and fog. He will pass through the gaping arch that marks its entrance and drag his blade behind him as he walks by rows of empty pews. There is an altar; there is a baptismal font. He will look into the waters and meet his reflection’s gaze, buried beneath bandages and frames, one final time. Then he will go before the altar and bow his head, before taking up his tools that lay there: a butcher’s apron, a bulging cloth sack. And a great, triangular, rusted helmet, all straight lines and sharp edges, heavier than sin, red as a memory. It digs into his shoulders as he puts it on. There has never been a time he has taken it off.

Then he will wait for it to happen all over again, so he might fulfill his duty. Punish and be punished, unto the day of Judgment, now and forever, world without end. 

Amen.

In the dream, James is falling, and he's not sure which is worse: the impact waiting for him at the bottom, or the notion that there is no bottom, that he is simply going to plummet forever into deep and deeper black. Because the long fall is all there is; because space and time and motion have no meaning in the dark; because now, only now does he understand that what lies without must also be within. Inside of James Sunderland there is no heart, nothing but a black and bleeding hole. And inside that –

Why, there’s nothing. Nothing at all.