Nachtmahr, pt. 3
Oct. 18th, 2010 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sermocinareFandoms: Watchmen/Silent Hill
Title: Nachtmahr (3/6)
Rating: R
Warnings: violence, gore, horror
Characters/Pairings: Adrian, Pyramid Head (and maybe Rorschach's ghost)
Disclaimer: Watchmen belongs to Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons. The Silent Hill franchise is property of Konami.
Summary: Still looking for a way out of Silent Hill, Adrian sees what might very well be Rorschach's ghost. Then, Silent Hill's other face reveals itself, causing Adrian to come face to iron face with Pyramid Head.
Previous chapters: 1, 2
Walking down the street, Adrian was amazed by how familiar this town seemed. He had never been here, hadn’t even heard of this town before, but he still knew its layout just as well, maybe even better, than he knew that of New York. Through nightly repetition, dream had turned into memory, and now he could walk through Silent Hill’s streets without even having to look at their names. Adrian’s mouth twitched into a self-deprecating smile. If only he had dreamed of a way out. But that was not how the dream had ended. He wasn’t exactly sure what kind of ending he had dreamed up for himself, but he was quite certain it hadn’t been a happy one. People like him didn’t get a happy ending, not even in their own dreams.
Before it had begun its slow decay, Silent Hill must have been a pleasant little town to live in. Closer to the old town center, the large mansions gave way to small, almost picturesque two-storey buildings. Adrian had passed a few apartment complexes, but other than that, there were almost none of the usual trappings of urbanization, of too many people living in increasingly cramped spaces. There wasn’t even a supermarket or large department store. At least he couldn’t remember one. All of the town’s businesses were small mom-and-pop affairs. It was the kind of place city folk moved to when they wanted to raise a family, or rather, it would have been if it weren’t so far away from the rest of civilization, a fact that worried Adrian more and more.
Drifting lazily from the front of a stone building to the mouth of an alleyway, the beam of Adrian’s flashlight was caught and reflected by a pair of eyes. Adrian stopped in his tracks, his hand going to the gun he had tucked away in his belt. For a few seconds, none of them moved, then the creature turned its head and slipped away into the darkness of the alleyway, leaving Adrian alone with the impossibly loud sound of his heartbeat drumming in his ears. For a crazy moment, he felt an almost uncontrollable urge to follow the creature into the alley, but then, hand still on the gun, Adrian backed away slowly, walking backwards until he was sure he had put ample space between himself and whatever that thing was.
Why was this creature following him?
Don’t be silly, he chided himself, shaking his head. It probably wasn’t even the same animal he had glimpsed at the side of the road before. This was an abandoned town surrounded by wilderness, it was to be expected that a few wild animals would have had moved in after the human population had left.
Adrian’s wandering had led him to the front steps of what used to be Silent Hill’s only school, Midwich Elementary. Following a whim, he decided to go inside and check the classrooms. Maybe he would find something useful here. After all, a favourite topic of elementary school geography was familiarizing the children with the area they were living in.
Adrian had to throw his whole weight against the large double door a few times before the rusty hinges decided to budge, but finally, he was able to push the door open, the creaking and scraping noises setting his teeth on edge.
The door opened into a large hallway stretching away to the left and right, the beam of his flashlight barely reaching each end. To his right, he could make out a drinking fountain, and the floor was littered with paper and the occasional book, which was somewhat strange considering how the building didn’t seem to have been vandalized. There were no smashed windows, no broken down doors, not even graffiti on the lockers that were lined up against the walls.
Adrian aimed the beam of his flashlight at the papers lying at his feet. Large, clumsily scrawled letters covering a few sheets of lined paper. Single-digit calculations, some of them wrong. Pushing a few sheets aside with the tip of his shoe, he uncovered some drawings, the usual houses, flowers, animals and stick-people. Somehow, the bright, colourful scenes on the floor seemed to increase the darkness and misery that pervaded the rest of the building.
There was something odd about one of the drawings, though. Adrian narrowed his eyes, tilting his head to the side to put the drawing at the right angle. That squiggle in the upper right hand corner seemed somehow familiar, and he was sure he’d seen it before, a long time ago…
Rorschach. The letters that Adrian had, at first, taken for the kid’s initials were in fact Rorschach’s signature mark.
But that was impossible. Ludicrous. This was a child’s drawing, and surely, the child had just scribbled something into the corner without knowing what it was. Or maybe it had known. After all, children had been undeniably fascinated by the phenomenon of masked vigilantes, something he had been able to use to his advantage, financially.
Looking up from the drawing, Adrian thought he caught a movement at the far end of the hallway, and shone his light in that direction, the beam just catching the edge of the outline of a small figure taking off around the corner. A small figure in what had looked like a trench coat.
Running down the hallway, Adrian rounded the corner at the same time he heard the click of a lock falling into place. There was no one to be seen. Whoever it had been, and he was most definitely not going to jump to conclusions here, not letting his mind spin into some kind of paranoia, he had probably hidden himself away in one of the adjoining classrooms.
Adrian briskly walked down to the first door, trying the handle. Locked. Shining his flashlight through the door’s small glass window, he tried to make out details of the room behind it, but couldn’t see much besides a few desks. He tried the next door, again without success, but the third seemed to be the charm, swinging open without protest. Adrian stepped into the room, sweeping it with the flashlight.
It was empty. Desks, two cupboards, a row of brightly colored handprints on the wall. But no sign of anybody. Adrian was turning to leave when he caught the writing on the blackboard, the sight of which made him freeze in place. The scrawled letters were unmistakably the same handwriting as that in the diary
“But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection.”
There was a howling, screaming noise as suddenly, not far off, a siren flared into life, the sound clawing through Adrian’s ears and down his spine, turning his blood into ice. He knew that this time, there would be no waking up, no simply forgetting what was bound to come. This time, everything was real.
At the first note of the siren, Adrian’s surroundings had started to change. The black and grey darkness was replaced by a sickly orange glow, as if everything were lit up by an unseen fire. The paint on the walls, parts of the floor, even some of the walls themselves started to peel away, falling not down but upwards, revealing a skeleton of corroded iron mesh.
Adrian could feel panic rising like bile in his throat, and he stepped back into the hallway, casting around for an escape route, some place unaffected by this hellish transformation. Somewhere he could hide. He didn’t know how, but he knew that he shouldn’t be caught outside right now. He needed to hide until this was over.
Sprinting down the corridor, he threw himself against the door to the men’s room, not expecting it to be open and almost falling to his knees as he stumbled inside. It was darker in here than on the hallway, the transformation seeming incomplete, and Adrian drew a deep breath.
His exhalation was answered by a hissing, gnashing sound as the shadows in the far end of the room began to move. As if they had just formed themselves out of the darkness, two small shapes disentangled themselves from the shadows. They were only as tall as children, but their bodies were smooth, their skin cracked and dark like burnt wood, their faces featureless except for two holes where the eyes should have been. From those holes came a red-hot glow, and they were looking in Adrian’s direction, creeping towards him with a mindless purpose, their twisted bodies moving with an uncanny elegance.
With a short, strangled cry, Adrian pulled the gun from his belt, aiming it at the nearer of the two horrors, and fired two rounds into its head. The thing screeched like a wounded bird of prey and collapsed at the feet of its companion, twitching for a second before going still. Not waiting for any reaction of the second monster, Adrian fired another round, which tore through the thing’s throat, leaving it hissing madly as it fell down on top of the other one. Its body was still thrashing when Adrian stepped back out onto the corridor and took off in the direction of the exit.
The wail of the siren had stopped, but now, the air was filled with a low, booming noise that seemed to filter in not through his ears, but through his very bones. Blood rushing through his ears, Adrian didn’t notice the scrabbling and clicking until he turned the corner into the next corridor, the far end of which was covered by a mass of crawling beetles which were scurrying all over the floor, walls and ceiling, advancing on him like a shining black wave.
At the end of the corridor stood a man, his face hidden by thick sheets of corroded metal which formed a mishappen pyramid around his head. One of his hands was dragging a huge sword, the blade of which was splashed with blood. The man was naked except for a loincloth hanging around his hips, his skin, too, splashed with blood, some fresh, some already drying in rust-brown patterns on his torso.
Noticing Adrian, the man cocked his head in a curious motion exaggerated by the metal pyramid sitting on his shoulders. Slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, as if he knew Adrian wouldn’t be able to escape, he advanced, his sword making a scraping noise as its tip was dragged over the floor.
Adrian wanted to run, flee, but it was as if his legs were rooted to the ground, leaving him unable to move even a step backwards. Hands shaking, he raised the pistol, firing at the swordsman, but the bullets didn’t seem to hit the target, instead ricocheting off the metal helmet. The man seemed to be completely unimpressed by Adrian’s attempts at stopping him, still advancing at a leisurely pace, and underneath all the panic and sheer terror, a part of Adrian noted that there was something strangely familiar about him.
Whatever it was, Adrian had no time to ponder it, for as soon as he was close enough, the man raised his impossibly large sword over his head and brought it down in a great arc aimed towards Adrian’s head. And suddenly, Adrian’s body was obeying him again, ducking and rolling out of the way of that horrible weapon which sliced into the steel mesh of the wall next to him as if it were nothing but spiderwebs. Adrian once again ducked out of the way as the sword came down on him a second time, this time close enough that he could feel a rush of air at his ear.
Lying on his back, Adrian fired a round straight into the man’s chest, stopping him in mid-swing. His sword balanced over his head, his enemy seemed to consider Adrian for a second. But instead of dying, or even letting go of his sword, the man just made a strange noise, like bone grating over metal, hollow and horrible.
He was laughing. Adrian had just shot him in the chest, and the monster was laughing. He once again raised his sword, ready to cleave his prey in half, when the siren wailed into life again. With a grunt, the man let his weapon sink. Adrian was unable to do anything but stare, and for a cold second, Adrian knew the man was staring back. Putting him to memory. Then, the swordsman turned around and, once again carelessly dragging his weapon over the floor, left, his army of insects following him, taking with them the glow, the rusted metal walls and all the strange horror that had suddenly engulfed Adrian, leaving him once more alone in the dark, cold hallways of Midwich Elementary.
Chapter 4
Title: Nachtmahr (3/6)
Rating: R
Warnings: violence, gore, horror
Characters/Pairings: Adrian, Pyramid Head (and maybe Rorschach's ghost)
Disclaimer: Watchmen belongs to Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons. The Silent Hill franchise is property of Konami.
Summary: Still looking for a way out of Silent Hill, Adrian sees what might very well be Rorschach's ghost. Then, Silent Hill's other face reveals itself, causing Adrian to come face to iron face with Pyramid Head.
Previous chapters: 1, 2
Walking down the street, Adrian was amazed by how familiar this town seemed. He had never been here, hadn’t even heard of this town before, but he still knew its layout just as well, maybe even better, than he knew that of New York. Through nightly repetition, dream had turned into memory, and now he could walk through Silent Hill’s streets without even having to look at their names. Adrian’s mouth twitched into a self-deprecating smile. If only he had dreamed of a way out. But that was not how the dream had ended. He wasn’t exactly sure what kind of ending he had dreamed up for himself, but he was quite certain it hadn’t been a happy one. People like him didn’t get a happy ending, not even in their own dreams.
Before it had begun its slow decay, Silent Hill must have been a pleasant little town to live in. Closer to the old town center, the large mansions gave way to small, almost picturesque two-storey buildings. Adrian had passed a few apartment complexes, but other than that, there were almost none of the usual trappings of urbanization, of too many people living in increasingly cramped spaces. There wasn’t even a supermarket or large department store. At least he couldn’t remember one. All of the town’s businesses were small mom-and-pop affairs. It was the kind of place city folk moved to when they wanted to raise a family, or rather, it would have been if it weren’t so far away from the rest of civilization, a fact that worried Adrian more and more.
Drifting lazily from the front of a stone building to the mouth of an alleyway, the beam of Adrian’s flashlight was caught and reflected by a pair of eyes. Adrian stopped in his tracks, his hand going to the gun he had tucked away in his belt. For a few seconds, none of them moved, then the creature turned its head and slipped away into the darkness of the alleyway, leaving Adrian alone with the impossibly loud sound of his heartbeat drumming in his ears. For a crazy moment, he felt an almost uncontrollable urge to follow the creature into the alley, but then, hand still on the gun, Adrian backed away slowly, walking backwards until he was sure he had put ample space between himself and whatever that thing was.
Why was this creature following him?
Don’t be silly, he chided himself, shaking his head. It probably wasn’t even the same animal he had glimpsed at the side of the road before. This was an abandoned town surrounded by wilderness, it was to be expected that a few wild animals would have had moved in after the human population had left.
Adrian’s wandering had led him to the front steps of what used to be Silent Hill’s only school, Midwich Elementary. Following a whim, he decided to go inside and check the classrooms. Maybe he would find something useful here. After all, a favourite topic of elementary school geography was familiarizing the children with the area they were living in.
Adrian had to throw his whole weight against the large double door a few times before the rusty hinges decided to budge, but finally, he was able to push the door open, the creaking and scraping noises setting his teeth on edge.
The door opened into a large hallway stretching away to the left and right, the beam of his flashlight barely reaching each end. To his right, he could make out a drinking fountain, and the floor was littered with paper and the occasional book, which was somewhat strange considering how the building didn’t seem to have been vandalized. There were no smashed windows, no broken down doors, not even graffiti on the lockers that were lined up against the walls.
Adrian aimed the beam of his flashlight at the papers lying at his feet. Large, clumsily scrawled letters covering a few sheets of lined paper. Single-digit calculations, some of them wrong. Pushing a few sheets aside with the tip of his shoe, he uncovered some drawings, the usual houses, flowers, animals and stick-people. Somehow, the bright, colourful scenes on the floor seemed to increase the darkness and misery that pervaded the rest of the building.
There was something odd about one of the drawings, though. Adrian narrowed his eyes, tilting his head to the side to put the drawing at the right angle. That squiggle in the upper right hand corner seemed somehow familiar, and he was sure he’d seen it before, a long time ago…
Rorschach. The letters that Adrian had, at first, taken for the kid’s initials were in fact Rorschach’s signature mark.
But that was impossible. Ludicrous. This was a child’s drawing, and surely, the child had just scribbled something into the corner without knowing what it was. Or maybe it had known. After all, children had been undeniably fascinated by the phenomenon of masked vigilantes, something he had been able to use to his advantage, financially.
Looking up from the drawing, Adrian thought he caught a movement at the far end of the hallway, and shone his light in that direction, the beam just catching the edge of the outline of a small figure taking off around the corner. A small figure in what had looked like a trench coat.
Running down the hallway, Adrian rounded the corner at the same time he heard the click of a lock falling into place. There was no one to be seen. Whoever it had been, and he was most definitely not going to jump to conclusions here, not letting his mind spin into some kind of paranoia, he had probably hidden himself away in one of the adjoining classrooms.
Adrian briskly walked down to the first door, trying the handle. Locked. Shining his flashlight through the door’s small glass window, he tried to make out details of the room behind it, but couldn’t see much besides a few desks. He tried the next door, again without success, but the third seemed to be the charm, swinging open without protest. Adrian stepped into the room, sweeping it with the flashlight.
It was empty. Desks, two cupboards, a row of brightly colored handprints on the wall. But no sign of anybody. Adrian was turning to leave when he caught the writing on the blackboard, the sight of which made him freeze in place. The scrawled letters were unmistakably the same handwriting as that in the diary
“But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection.”
There was a howling, screaming noise as suddenly, not far off, a siren flared into life, the sound clawing through Adrian’s ears and down his spine, turning his blood into ice. He knew that this time, there would be no waking up, no simply forgetting what was bound to come. This time, everything was real.
At the first note of the siren, Adrian’s surroundings had started to change. The black and grey darkness was replaced by a sickly orange glow, as if everything were lit up by an unseen fire. The paint on the walls, parts of the floor, even some of the walls themselves started to peel away, falling not down but upwards, revealing a skeleton of corroded iron mesh.
Adrian could feel panic rising like bile in his throat, and he stepped back into the hallway, casting around for an escape route, some place unaffected by this hellish transformation. Somewhere he could hide. He didn’t know how, but he knew that he shouldn’t be caught outside right now. He needed to hide until this was over.
Sprinting down the corridor, he threw himself against the door to the men’s room, not expecting it to be open and almost falling to his knees as he stumbled inside. It was darker in here than on the hallway, the transformation seeming incomplete, and Adrian drew a deep breath.
His exhalation was answered by a hissing, gnashing sound as the shadows in the far end of the room began to move. As if they had just formed themselves out of the darkness, two small shapes disentangled themselves from the shadows. They were only as tall as children, but their bodies were smooth, their skin cracked and dark like burnt wood, their faces featureless except for two holes where the eyes should have been. From those holes came a red-hot glow, and they were looking in Adrian’s direction, creeping towards him with a mindless purpose, their twisted bodies moving with an uncanny elegance.
With a short, strangled cry, Adrian pulled the gun from his belt, aiming it at the nearer of the two horrors, and fired two rounds into its head. The thing screeched like a wounded bird of prey and collapsed at the feet of its companion, twitching for a second before going still. Not waiting for any reaction of the second monster, Adrian fired another round, which tore through the thing’s throat, leaving it hissing madly as it fell down on top of the other one. Its body was still thrashing when Adrian stepped back out onto the corridor and took off in the direction of the exit.
The wail of the siren had stopped, but now, the air was filled with a low, booming noise that seemed to filter in not through his ears, but through his very bones. Blood rushing through his ears, Adrian didn’t notice the scrabbling and clicking until he turned the corner into the next corridor, the far end of which was covered by a mass of crawling beetles which were scurrying all over the floor, walls and ceiling, advancing on him like a shining black wave.
At the end of the corridor stood a man, his face hidden by thick sheets of corroded metal which formed a mishappen pyramid around his head. One of his hands was dragging a huge sword, the blade of which was splashed with blood. The man was naked except for a loincloth hanging around his hips, his skin, too, splashed with blood, some fresh, some already drying in rust-brown patterns on his torso.
Noticing Adrian, the man cocked his head in a curious motion exaggerated by the metal pyramid sitting on his shoulders. Slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, as if he knew Adrian wouldn’t be able to escape, he advanced, his sword making a scraping noise as its tip was dragged over the floor.
Adrian wanted to run, flee, but it was as if his legs were rooted to the ground, leaving him unable to move even a step backwards. Hands shaking, he raised the pistol, firing at the swordsman, but the bullets didn’t seem to hit the target, instead ricocheting off the metal helmet. The man seemed to be completely unimpressed by Adrian’s attempts at stopping him, still advancing at a leisurely pace, and underneath all the panic and sheer terror, a part of Adrian noted that there was something strangely familiar about him.
Whatever it was, Adrian had no time to ponder it, for as soon as he was close enough, the man raised his impossibly large sword over his head and brought it down in a great arc aimed towards Adrian’s head. And suddenly, Adrian’s body was obeying him again, ducking and rolling out of the way of that horrible weapon which sliced into the steel mesh of the wall next to him as if it were nothing but spiderwebs. Adrian once again ducked out of the way as the sword came down on him a second time, this time close enough that he could feel a rush of air at his ear.
Lying on his back, Adrian fired a round straight into the man’s chest, stopping him in mid-swing. His sword balanced over his head, his enemy seemed to consider Adrian for a second. But instead of dying, or even letting go of his sword, the man just made a strange noise, like bone grating over metal, hollow and horrible.
He was laughing. Adrian had just shot him in the chest, and the monster was laughing. He once again raised his sword, ready to cleave his prey in half, when the siren wailed into life again. With a grunt, the man let his weapon sink. Adrian was unable to do anything but stare, and for a cold second, Adrian knew the man was staring back. Putting him to memory. Then, the swordsman turned around and, once again carelessly dragging his weapon over the floor, left, his army of insects following him, taking with them the glow, the rusted metal walls and all the strange horror that had suddenly engulfed Adrian, leaving him once more alone in the dark, cold hallways of Midwich Elementary.
Chapter 4
