Blood+ Fan Fiction ❯ Silent Hill: Heiress to an Execution ❯ Chapter One: The Prognosis ( Chapter 1 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

Laura and James sat at the kitchen table late one night, sipping hot cocoa from ceramic mugs. A radio on the counter blared ACDC. Laura sang along to the tunes as she tossed miniature marshmallows across the table into James’s mug. A little cocoa splashed here and there, creating sticky pools of liquid on the table. James merely laughed at her antics, his good humor having returned to him quickly ages ago. Laura laughed, too, and their laughter drowned out the music. Neither of them could have cared less, sitting there laughing like two Mad Hatter’s in the dead of the night.
They were the best of friends, two peas in a pod as the old saying went. Despite their undeniable closeness, though, Laura still remained unaware of what had happened to James in Silent Hill ten years ago. He refused to talk about it, but it was clearly evident that he had been left scarred by his last trip. Laura had her fond, if not dislocated memories of Silent Hill, but having been only a few days shy of eight years old at the time the two of them (along with the long forgotten memory of Eddie Dombrowski) had been present in the town, she hadn’t understood his anguish, his odd questions, and most of all, the haunted look in his eyes. She hadn’t understood him. And on top of all that, she had learned a hard truth at that age, that James had murdered his own wife, her best friend, and she had said some hurtful things to him, things that he may have deserved to hear but were nonetheless hurtful. But despite her lack of understanding, she had grown to love James like her very own father. He had seemed to grow himself, to love her like his own daughter, and for that she loved him even more. She had forgiven him and there were no hard feelings. She only wished she could have enjoyed life with James and his wife both. She was sorry that it couldn’t happen. The three of them together would have been very happy with life. Or so Laura believed.
James pushed his cocoa aside. “Time for me to hit the sack,” he said, standing up and pushing his chair underneath the table. He moved to pick up his mug.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll clean up. I’m not really tired just yet, anyway,” Laura said, stifling a yawn. She took another sip of cocoa to hide the fact that she actually was tired, only too anxious to fall asleep.
“Sure, Lo. Thanks,” he said. He left the kitchen, only to return seconds later to say, “Don’t stay up too late.”
“Okay.”
“’Night, hon.”
“Goodnight.”
And Laura was left alone in the kitchen. She dug her Camel’s out of her jeans back pocket and lit one up, cursing high school as she smoked, for it was there she had picked up the nasty habit. One cigarette did the trick, however. She was finally relaxed to a point where sleep would come easily enough, courtesy of hot cocoa and the notorious Turkish and domestic blend of Camel lights.
She stood and collected both hers and James’s mugs and cross the polished linoleum to place them into the sink. She emptied her own and refilled it with ice water. She drank until the mug was empty, washed it out and then put it to sleep in its cabinet. She did the same with the other.
Bloated with cocoa and water, she made her way up the stairs to her bedroom. She passed James’s room on the way and noticed that his light was still on. She opened the door without knocking, causing James, who was seated at his computer checking email before turning in, to recoil and nearly fall off of his spinning chair.
Laura stifled a laugh. “Sorry,” she managed. “I was just checking in.”
“That’s okay,” he said, turning away from the monitor. “Did you clean up?”
“Yeah. So I’m going to bed, now…See you in the morning.”
“Sleep well. Have wonderful dreams.”
Laura smiled and left the room. She went straight to her own room and closed the door behind her. She flicked on the lamp beside her bed and undressed. She pulled out a pair of old cheerleading shorts, black, and a simple white tank from her dresser of drawers and put them on. The smell of laundry detergent and febreeze filled her nostrils as she settled into her bed, a reminder of the clean order in her life. And then she thought about Mary. She wondered often how somebody she had only known a week could have such an impact on her life. She had called Mary her best friend, though there had been a substantial different in age. But Mary had been so nice. And her memory had greedily stayed with Laura, a sort of voice of reason, a guide. She was usually the last person Laura though of before falling asleep at night. Mary had a hold on Laura, and she believed that she always would. What would she be doing now, if she were still alive? If she had never become sick? If her selfish yet beloved James had never taken a pillow to her face…?
“Stop that,” she mumbled to herself, on the edges of sleep. She slipped over that edge, falling face first into a cacophony of memories, white lights, blurring images. She reached out and caught onto one, holding on with all she had.
She was holding onto a bowling ball rack at Pete’s Bowl-O-Rama. An overweight ash-headed male shared the scene. “So what’d you do?” Laura asked him. “Robbery, murder?”
“Nah, nothing like that,” Eddie answered, preoccupied with his pizza.
“I thought you said the cops were after you.”
“No,” he swallowed a large bite. “I just ran ‘cause I was scared. I don’t know what the cops are doing.”
“But if you did something bad, why don’t you just say you were sorry? Well, I guess I run away a lots, too.”
“Did you know he killed me?” Eddie asked, and before Laura could have a moment’s chance to understand, the bowling allies dissolved. Eddie disappeared. She stood outside a set of large double doors. The hallway she stood in stretched on for miles and miles to each side of her.
“Open the door, Laura,” came James’s voice from the other side of the double doors. An irritated, juvenile anger welled up inside of Laura. She hit the wooden door with both fists, seething.
“Why should I?” she demanded. “I’m a liar, right?”
She fell to her knees as the door in front of her disintegrated to reveal a classy restaurant. It was the restaurant from the hotel. James stood before her, his hands in his pockets. She tried to apologize for locking him in that room, but she couldn’t. She could only ask the obvious.
“You’re here to find Mary, aren’t you James?” she asked him. “Well…have you?”
“No,” James replied. “Is that why you’re here, too?”
“She’s here, isn’t she?” Laura became excited, demanding. “IF you know where she is, tell me!”
And then the restaurant disappeared, replaced by a handsome hotel suit. Laura stood next to a sulking James. He sat in an armchair with his face in his hands.
“Mary’s gone. She’s dead,” he told Laura, and Laura balled her fists, gritted her teeth. Anger clouded her vision. Her chest hurt. She knew it was true, inside.
“Liar!” she called James. “That’s a lie!”
“No, that’s not true…” James told her. Laura dropped her fists and her face fell.
“She…she died ‘cause she was sick?” she asked.
“No,” James shook his head. Now his face fell. “I killed her.”
Laura froze. Then she closed her eyes and her face contorted into that of a serial killer’s when he’s run out of women to murder. She was sad, but her sadness was overcome in seconds by the raging madness of a baby bull.
“You killer!” she yelled at James. “Why’d you do it?! I hate you! I want her back! Give her back to me!” Laura threw the tantrum of an eight year old child, only days fresh of her birthday. She reached out and shoved his left shoulder as hard as she could. “I knew it! You didn’t care about her!”
But I did.
“I hate you, James!” she shoved him several more times, causing his heart to break in two. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! She was always waiting for you…why…why?”
Laura sat up, back in her own bed, eighteen again. Her sheets were damp with sweat. Her heart was pounding, her breathing labored. According to the digital clock on the nightstand, it was 1:28 in the morning. She had accidentally left the lamp on. She reached over and turned it off, which a few minutes later proved unnecessary. She was wide awake and unwilling to lie down again. Her mouth was as dry as the Sahara. Perhaps if she went down to the kitchen for a glass of water, she could return to bed again. She turned the lamp back on.
The lamp provided enough light for her to make her way to the dresser. Now shivering, in spite of her heated nightmare, she took a sweatshirt from the middle drawer and pulled it on over her cropped blonde locks.
She opened her bedroom door and stepped out into the upstairs hallway, pulling the door shut soundlessly behind her.
The hall was hung with shadows, but wan light rose along the stairwell from the foyer below. On her way from the kitchen to her bedroom, she had not taken the time to switch off any of the lights.
On her way down the stairs, she thought of her dream. The dialogue had been just as it had been ten years ago, and the scenes had felt chillingly real. But what in the world had Dream Eddie meant when he had said, “Did you know he killed me?”
At the foot of the stairs she stopped, listening. The silence in the house was almost deafening.
Her thirst growing more acute by the second, she made her way to the lit kitchen. She turned the light off as she entered. The porch lights outside were enough for her to navigate.
She took a can of Pepsi from the fridge, popped the tab, tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and took a long drink.
It didn’t taste like cola. It tasted sharp, bitter, and it burned the back of Laura’s throat. Frowning, she opened her eyes and looked at the can, only to find that it wasn’t a can at all. It was a bottle of beer, a Corona. James didn’t drink Corona. When James had a beer, which was rarely now days, it was a Heineken.
Fear lanced through Laura’s body, a fear that she couldn’t account for. Then, an image flashed in her mind, an image that stayed there a good minute. It was James’s body, covered in blood. He was unmistakably dead. His throat had been slit several times. He stared out at Laura through those dead eyes, crying for help.
“No…” Laura managed, but it came out in nothing more than a whisper.
The image disappeared. Laura shook the aftereffects, shuddering uncontrollably. Jesus, that dream had really gotten to her.
Then, to further her uncertainty, she noticed that the tile floor of the kitchen was gone. She was standing barefoot on gravel. The stones cut into the balls of her feet.
As her heart began to race, she looked around the kitchen with a desperate need to reaffirm that she was in her own house, that the world had not just shifted into an alternate reality. Her eyes traveled over the familiar white washed birched cabinets, the dark granite countertops, the dishwasher, the gleaming face of the built-in microwave, and she willed the oncoming nightmare to recede. But the gravel beneath her feet remained. She was still holding the Corona in her right hand. She turned toward the sink with the intent on emptying it and splashing cold water onto her face, but the sink was no longer there. One half of the entire kitchen had vanished, leaving the other half in complete disarray, and then--
--She was not in her kitchen at all. She was standing on a vaguely familiar road some 400 miles away. In front of her loomed the massive hospital dubbed Brookhaven. The sky behind it was as dark as the pavement she now stood on. The hospital, from the outside look of it, was in complete shambles. This was not how she remembered it. This was wrong. What had happened? What was going on?
“Hello?” she asked to no one, her voice shaking with fear. She turned in a circle. She was seemingly alone. The streets were bare save for a few leaves and twigs. And then she saw something move out of the corner of her eye. She spun on her feet, which was when she realized that she was no longer barefoot but wearing her rubber-soled black Rockports. She looked up. There, standing but thirty feet away, stood an ambling creature, walking slowly towards her. By creature she thought about the Boogeyman underneath her eight-year-old self’s bed.
“This is just a dream,” she whispered to herself. “It’s only a dream.”
It was a nightmare. Unsheathing themselves from the fog and shadows behind the first creature, ten, eleven, twelve others joined in on the advance.
“Holy shit,” Laura said, closing her eyes, trembling. “It’s just a dream. It’s just a dream. It’s just a dream>“
The creatures in front of her simultaneously let out a screeching wail. Laura covered her ears, her eyes still closed. She was screaming now. “It’s just a dream! It’s just a dream, it’s just a--”
--she gasped as cold Pepsi foamed from the dropped can and puddled around her bare feet. The gravel and pavement had disappeared, along with Brookhaven Hospital and the fleet of monsters. A spreading pool of cola glistened on the peach-colored Santa Fe tiles of the kitchen floor.