Blood+ Fan Fiction ❯ Silent Hill: Heiress to an Execution ❯ Chapter Two: ( Chapter 2 )

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

Laura cleaned up the spilled Pepsi with paper towels. By the time she was at the kitchen sink, to wash her hands, she was still shaking but not as badly as she had been. Terror, which had been briefly all-consuming, not made a bit of room inside of her rattled mind for curiosity. She reluctantly touched the rim of the stainless steel sink and then the faucet, as if they might dissolve beneath her fingers.
She turned on the water, adjusted hot and cold, and scrubbed at her fingers. She scrubbed as if to rid dirt and grim, though she had taken a thirty minute shower earlier that night. The water felt good against her clammy skin.
She looked up at the window above the sink, which faced onto the rear yard. The yard was gone. A highway lay in its place. The kitchen window had become elongated and dirty, caked with a decade of filth. She could just barely make out the activities beyond the window. Swaddled in fog and only partially revealed by the gray sky was the army of demons she had encountered only moments before. Yet this time she was protected, safe inside Brookhaven Hospital. She sensed a presence beside her where there should have been nothing but the double ovens. When she turned her head she saw a dark-headed youth sitting on a comfy-looking armchair. He was staring past her, out the window. He had a watch in his hand, looking down at it every few seconds.
“Hello?” Laura said, confused. She was worried as to the reason why he would not acknowledge her presence. Perhaps, she thought, he could not see or hear her.
“It’s almost time,” he said, and it sounded as though he were repeating the phrase, mocking it. “Laura, Laura, Laura,” he said in a sing song voice. “When will you come to Silent Hill?”
“I’m right here!” Laura said, waving her hand in his face. He did not respond.
“How do you know my name?” she asked him, though she didn’t expect an answer, and just as she had expected, she didn’t get one.
“Time is drawing near,” the boy said to himself.
“What are you waiting for?!” Laura tried, yelling the question at the top of her lungs. She bent down and looked into the stranger’s eyes. They were peculiar, troubles. Then--
--Laura was standing at the kitchen sink again, breathing hard. She was eye level with the water taps, as though they had moments ago been the eyes of the boy sitting in Silent Hill waiting for her. Beyond the windows, she noticed as she stood straight up, lay only the back yard, blanketed by the night.
“Laura?”
Startled, she turned.
James was standing in the doorway, clad in sweatpants and a T-shirt. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
Wiping her sweaty hands on her sweatshirt, she tried to answer, but terror had rendered her mute.
James hurried towards her. “Laura?”


Laura sat at the kitchen table for the second time that night, again in the company of James. She was shaking, an early morning wreck, as she told James her accounts of what had happened, beginning with the strange dream and ending with her creepy visions of Brookhaven Hospital. She left out, of course, the monsters and the one vision where she had seen James as he lay dead against a backdrop that she hadn’t recognized. After all, she was looking at him now, and he was alive and well. She didn’t want to seem paranoid or anything.
At her request, James brewed a pot of coffee. The familiarity of the delicious aroma acted as an antidote to Laura’s fear. They drank the coffee in the hours left of night. Laura was transformed into a smooth sailor, though the weirdness of it all still clung to her senses like shoes stuck in mud. She couldn’t shake the curiosity, as much as she wanted.
James had only one, very narrow minded, explanation to offer. “No matter how it seemed at the time, you must not have been fully awake when you got out of bed. You were sleepwalking. You didn’t really wake up until I came into the kitchen and called your name.”
“I’ve never been a sleepwalker,” Laura retorted.
He tried to make light of her objection. “Never too late to take up a new affliction.”
“I don’t buy it.”
“Then what’s your explanation?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Sleepwalking, then,” James said smugly.
She stared down into the white porcelain cup that she clasped in both hands, as if she were a Gypsy trying to foresee the future in the patterns of light on the surface of the black brew. Had she seen the future?
Time elapsed. James returned to his bedroom shortly after three, hoping to get just a few more hours of sleep in before the sun came up. Laura could not fall back asleep. She knew that even before she tried. So she stayed up the rest of the morning, smoking cigarettes on her bed and watching Rosanne reruns on her small television. With the lights on, she could relax, she could enjoy her cigarettes and her beloved Rosanne. She was calm, and for the time being, forgot about all of the strange things that she had seen that night. She finally fell asleep at seven, and was thankfully undisturbed by the ghosts of her past.