tendercruelty

Out of the tatters she rose, first noticing with a strange wonder that there was no blood on the floor. No blood – no remnants of the ripped flesh, no ringing of the tortured screams that had accompanied the girl Alessa's terrible revenge. A deep and profound quiet had descended over the church only broken by the muffled sounds of Adam and twenty other shabbily dressed members of the church as they rose from the battered floor. Dust motes floated in the muted, foggy sunlight that filtered in through the windows.

“Christabella, you – you are still alive,” Adam, one of the churchmen, met her cold eyes fearfully, the horror of those moments spent in the Darkness still not forgotten.

“How many of us remain?” she asked quietly.

“Half have fallen to the Darkness,” another man spoke up.

Christabella nodded, turning her dark searching eyes upon her frightened congregation. Raising her voice, she said, “Together, our purity has overcome the power of the Darkness! We have passed through the fire and brimstone and been found worthy. Those of us who were lost were weak and had not the strength to fight the powers of the Darkness, but we have.”

“Anna’s mother is no longer with us,” one man called out.

“She was weak,” Christabella returned, her dark eyes shining. “As her daughter was weak.”

Just then, the sound of a broken ladder falling over met the ears of the congregation. They all turned to see Cybil groaning and rubbing her head. “Oh, shit, what a headache,” she groaned. She looked up and saw Christabella and the congregation staring at her, aghast. “Damn!” Cybil swore, standing up abruptly.

“You were burned,” Christabella’s eyes flickered. “How is it, then, that you are alive?”

Cybil shrugged, wiping the sweat off her face with the back of her hand. “Don’t ask me,” she said. As she spoke, she grasped a long splintered shard from the broken ladder and held it in front of her like a bayonet. “But I’m not about to let you screwballs try it again.”

“I don’t understand, Christabella,” Adam muttered. “Why did a witch and blasphemer such as this woman survive the fire and the purges of the Darkness?”

Christabella’s face hardened and then a grim little smile reached the edges of her lips. “Because she is a part of the Darkness!” she said, her voice rising as her eyes burned with fanatical intensity.

Cybil interrupted: “Before we start that up again, what I’d like to know is how the rest of you survived. From what I’ve been hearing, it sounds like a different kind of purging was going on while I was out.”

“That doesn’t concern you,” Christabella spat, her face white. Then she added, in a softer voice: “All of us were killed in the Darkness.” She hesitated as the memories of the ripping, merciless barbed wires entering her flesh crowded back in her mind. “But somehow we are once more whole.”

Cybil glanced up at the grey, misty sky through the windows. “Yeah, and still in this god-damned limbo,” she retorted.

Christabella glanced at her with a terrible calm. “You will never leave Silent Hill,” she said with a strange smile. “None of us have and none of us shall.”

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It had surprised him how very little there was on the Internet in relation to that haunted town "Silent Hill." Save for a few obscure and amateurish ghost hunters' websites, nothing existed but for the rumours that he had heard from certain folk in remote highway bars and the accounts of those who had survived the terrible fire that had ravaged the town several decades ago.

And yet if there was anything he possessed, it was a nagging relentlessness, particular in the pursuit of weird and esoteric studies. While other men might spend an evening in the company of drinking partners or women, his companions were the midnight candle and an ancient book of dark secrets.

It had taken six months to accumulate enough knowledge to make a reasonable guess as to where the abandoned town lay, but the delay had only whetted his curiosity to a still keener sharpness. There is no need to go into the painstaking methods he took to secure his information; the many shadowy characters he was forced to contact, the long nights he spent in furtive exploration of the police records.

If there was any true hindrance to the stranger's queer researches, it was in the form of Thomas Gucci, a West Virginian officer.

"Strange that you should be asking about that place," Gucci said with an exaggeratedly Southern drawl. "Just the other week, there was this fellow named Mr. Da Silva, I believe, who said he'd lost a wife who'd run off there."

The stranger commented on how Silent Hill would be a rather unusual place for a wife to run off to.

Gucci shrugged. "You never know with women," he said evasively. "Just recently, Officer Cybil Bennett, one of the more reliable cops, just up and disappeared."

The stranger inquired as to the likelihood of Officer Bennett 'just up and disappearing.'

"I'll admit, she's not the type I would have thought to have done something like that," Gucci admitted. "But she's had a rough few years in the force – like I told Mr. Da Silva, she even found a kid who'd been chucked down a mine shaft by a loony." Gucci shook his head. "No, sir, if you've got any sense, you'll steer clear of that place."

The conversation could have gone badly for the stranger, except for the fact that unlike Mr. Da Silva, he chose not to argue with Gucci. Instead, Gucci was favourably impressed not only with the polite, unassuming nature of the stranger's character, but also with his extensive knowledge of Gucci's efforts on the police force during the last twenty years. Perhaps the fact that the stranger did not have a missing family member involved had a great deal to do with his detached air; or perhaps it lay in his possession of both a gentle, soft-spoken demeanour and an underlying coldness and calculating aspect that few acquaintances and even close friends detected except in brief, unexpected flashes.

Coincidentally, the following night as Gucci drove home thinking that he would not have to spend the next morning cleaning up one of Mr. Da Silva's rampages through the confidential area of the police files, the stranger was already carefully and methodically sifting through every single record that pertained to Silent Hill. It might be added, however, that he was very precise in making certain that the records room looked exactly as it had before his entering, so Gucci did not have a bad morning after all.

Thus it was that by nightfall, he was already driving down the lone highway under the twisting, darkened trees and the muted, fog-wrapped Gibbous moon. A dreamy, airy quality had descended over the land as completely as the white mist that dimmed the headlights and swirled about the car.

He had only driven for a half an hour when he caught a glimpse in the thickening fog of a shadow by the side of the road. Slowing the car, he saw that it was a girl – probably around ten years old – stumbling in the bracken by the edge of the forest. He parked the car by the side of the road and climbed out, coming towards her and asking who she was and whether she was lost.

The girl looked at him, eyes wide with fear, her lips trembling and her cheeks stained with tears. She seemed to hesitate the way children do when trying to judge whether a stranger might be a friend or a danger. This particular stranger had the quiet demeanour of a parent, but the disquieting smile of the cloaked, Death-like destroyers that haunt the minds of children that are cautioned against speaking to those they do not know. His general impression, particularly in the frightened mind of the little girl, was something between a mysterious guardian and a familiar nightmare.

"I'm – I'm Rachel," she said, her voice trembling and her eyes still fixed upon his face. Then, her eyes wavering, she asked, “Who are you?”

Piczo