Archive of Our Own

The weight of Mary’s body left the rowboat unbalanced.

The pull of the oars made his shoulders ache as James steered them across the lake, towards the place which sang and stank of old magic. Blisters were forming on his palms, soft and spider white. Weak hands, killer’s hands. He pulled at the oars.

“What do you think this will accomplish?” said Mary’s voice, from the corpse at his feet.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I have to believe it will accomplish something.”

“You think it will bring you absolution? Pitiful.”

“No.” James paused and stowed his oars to catch his breath. “It won’t. But I have to try anyway. Don’t you want to live?”

“It’s all I ever wanted.”

He nodded. Picked up the oars, and rowed on.

The fog lay so thick he couldn’t see the island until he was nearly upon it. He ran the tiny boat aground on the small, rocky beach, and stowed his oars. Stepped out, gravel crunching beneath his shoes.

“It’s so desolate here. Do you suppose we’re alone?”

“I know we’re not.”

He picked up Mary’s body from its row boat cradle. Wrapped in the sheet from her sickbed, perfumed with the sour stench of decay and sweated medication. With the smells of creams and injections, nutrition drinks and rotted flowers. He started to carry her up the beach.

The little island was crowned with a handful of towering trees, black pines which loomed above him, their tops lost in the fog. The ground beneath his feet was carpeted with pine needles. They slipped and slid beneath his feet as he wrestled the weight of her body up the slope.

But the altar was there, as he’d known it would be.

Its shape was blunted by time, weathered with the sand and storms of many centuries. He laid her on it with the same tenderness with which he’d once placed her on their marriage bed.

“I remember that. Remember thinking, ‘He’s an old fashioned bastard, isn’t he?’ But I thought it was fun, so I played along.”

He ran his hand across the stone, felt the textures of symbols carved and now worn smooth. Gods were beings of ritual. Beings of sacrifice. Beings of capricious will and unspeakable cruelty.

“What will you do? A life for a life?” She laughed. “You really think your life is worth as much as mine? That the scales will balance out?”

“I know they won’t.”

“What will you give, do you think?”

A good question. She was right, in her own way. Death was easy. Blood was easy. She’d taught him that. It was never so simple in the old stories. A woman waiting with a snuffed candle as the storm raged around her and the man who loved her drowned.

“What is sufficiently precious to you, selfish man, that you might give it up?”

He hesitated, then took the letter from inside his jacket.

He turned it over in his hands, felt the seam worn smooth where he’d opened it again, and again, and again. A symbol of their relationship. Of the intimacy born of knowledge both mundane and disgusting. Of the confirmation that she’d loved him. A tiny, flickering candle of hope in the ocean of pitiless apathy.

“Come on, baby, light my fire.”

He fished the lighter from his jacket pocket. The one he’d assembled in that place that wasn’t, the black pit of death and despair, carved beneath the bones of Silent Hill. Another symbol of vice turned vise. It was engraved with a little skull.

“It’s a metaphor,” said Mary, and laughed in the dark.

He held up the letter, flicked the lighter open. It caught, though he’d never once tried to ignite it since. The little flame flickered in the wind off the lake, but didn’t die. Windproof, the little metal chimney which guarded against the storm like the fingers of a steadfast woman.

“Do you think it belonged to a sailor?”

He pressed the flame to the corner of the letter. It kissed and caught. The burning front of ash and emptiness began to crawl up the edge of the paper.

O gods of this world, placed below the earth.

He held it as it burned. Seared his fingers in an agonizing kiss. He didn’t let it go. Fingers clamped like rigor mortis.

The way Mary’s had gone stiff after they’d made the drive to Silent Hill.

“It’s stupid they call it the little death, did you know that? It’s nothing like that at all.”

The letter extinguished. The ash blew away in the wind. His skin turned unspeakable colors beneath its touch.

He waited. Listening to the wind howl, feeling his hand throb, the scent of burned flesh and lake water in his nose.

Then the body under the sheet sat bolt upright, and Mary screamed.

James surged forward and tore the sheet from the thrashing body. Wrenched it back as though shucking an oyster, leaving the contents bare and peeled within.

Skeletal, thrashing limbs poked from the folds of the sheet as he tussled with the mass. Mary’s pajamas, the ones she’d died in, faded pale pink from many washings. The only ones she could bear to wear after the medication rendered her skin unbearably sensitive.

He pulled back the hood, desperate to see. He had to know—

Brittle, brown hair was revealed, cut short when leaving it long became too much work to maintain. A pale face and hollow, glittering eyes. A mouth like an open wound.

“Get the fuck away from me!” Mary screamed.

He stumbled backwards. Slipped in the pine needles and fell on his ass. Stared up in dumb shock as she ripped the rest of the sheet from her. As she knelt on the ancient and filthy stone, like the priestess of some ancient cult, gasping as though she’d run a marathon.

Her eyes landed on him. “You.”

It was an accusation. He didn’t move.

“You fucking monster,” she said.

“Yes.”

“What the fuck have you done?”

“Fixed a mistake,” he said. “Mary—”

“Fuck off!”

“It’s true. I—”

“Shut up.”

He did. The twinge in his chest as he silenced himself in the name of peace was a familiar one, one which predated even her.

Mary pressed her hands to her face, felt up across the oily strands of her hair. She looked as she had on her deathbed. Thin and hollow eyed, her skin rendered nearly translucent from the lack of sun and the side effects of the medication.

Her cheeks still bore the dark spots that formed themselves in dying flesh, and for a moment the black well of despair threatened to swamp him. Had he brought her back only to expire in agony in a few short weeks? It would have been a fitting punishment, but the thought crushed him.

Yet no, even as he watched, her skin smoothed itself out. Bruises healing and revealing new flesh. Her hair still hung limp and brittle, a mark of Cain of her illness, and he remembered the words of a doctor from long ago. How hair couldn’t be brought back to life, because it was dead already. Had died long before Mary had.

She straightened herself on the altar and swung her feet over the edge. Bare toes and wrinkled soles. He made to rise again, to extend his hand.

She slapped it away and he recoiled.

“Let me help you,” he pleaded.

“You’ve done quite enough.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for killing me?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not.”

“Maybe you think that. But I know better. I know what you thought, how you saw me.”

Anger sparked and burned sullenly. “How do you know that? Because you assumed? You’re my wife and—”

“Was, James. I was your wife. Til death do us part, isn’t that how it goes? And you made quite sure of that.”

He didn’t answer.

“Where are we?”

“An island in Toluca Lake.”

“In Silent Hill?” She threw her head back and laughed. “Are you fucking kidding me? You brought me here?”

“You said you wanted to come here.”

“Unbelievable.”

“What do you want?”

“I wanted to live, James!” Her eyes boiled with a depth of rage the reflections of her conjured by his fevered brain could never match. “I wanted to have a baby, make a life, all those trappings they talk about on sitcom television. I wanted the pain to stop and I wanted to be well again. But most of all I want you to leave me the fuck alone!”

He said nothing. Dog-dumb before her, like a beaten animal. Her breath ran quick with anger.

“Do you want me to take you back?” he said.

“Yes. Immediately.”

He turned and started walking towards the shoreline. He heard her get up to follow him, the crunch of the pine needles.

And while the newly wedded bride, Euridyce, was walking through the grass…

The rowboat was where he had abandoned it, moored on the pebble shore. The fog swirled thick around them, steps crunching in tandem.

Why didn’t he take her, I wonder? The man who loved the Lady of Light? They could have sailed away to a farther shore where no one knew them, and cast aside the chains of fate.

Except you can’t, can you?

He grasped the edge of the boat and watched her clamber into it, still trailing the shroud in which he’d wrapped her. He bent and pushed the boat, wading into the icy lake to launch it. The waters of Tartarus soaked his jeans, and for a moment he imagined walking her, further and further out. Until his grip failed and he slipped beneath the surface.

Fall into the waters of Lethe and find rest.

He climbed into the boat before the lake could take him. Grasped the oars and began to row.

She watched him in stony silence as they made the crossing. As they glided across the water it almost seemed they were suspended in fog. Two spirits adrift between worlds. He wondered if they could travel thus forever. Until the fractured edges of their shattered marriage could knit themselves as new bone.

Instead the boat launch came upon them, and Mary was standing before he could even tie the vessel off. He lunged and groped for the edges, just barely managing to keep it even keel as she stepped out onto the pier.

“Don’t fucking follow me,” Mary said, without looking back, and stumbled off into the fog.

In the end he followed her; what else could he do?

He trailed behind her shadow, keeping watch for monsters. Here and there he could see shades of them staggering in the mist, but they approached neither her nor him.

To his surprise, she went to Heaven’s Night. He stood on the doorstep for what felt like hours, uncertain, but finally entered after her.

The place was still abandoned, but lit with the same warm, pink glow, long shadows cast by the poles on the stage. He found her rummaging amid the detritus behind the counter. She produced a jar of salted peanuts, unscrewed the cap, and began to eat them.

“Are they still good?”

“I thought I told you to get lost.”

“Where else am I supposed to go? I came here to find you.”

“And so you did.”

He sat at one of the tables, watching as she searched among the remnants of bar food. She looked at a jar of pickles, checked the expiration date, and made a face. Pulled a bottle of some kind of brown liquor from behind the bar, took a drink.

“Are you hungry?” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m not. I haven’t been since I got here.”

She looked up at him, momentarily startled. “Wait, you mean not at all?”

He shook his head. “Not thirsty either, not really. That’s why I was surprised you were.”

“Starving,” she said. “Like I haven’t eaten in days.” She tossed back another handful of peanuts. “I could go for a steak.”

“I don’t think there’s any meat here that isn’t run with maggots.”

“Go figure. Where the fuck did you trap us?”

“I told you, we’re in Silent Hill.”

“Of course we are.” She sighed. “It would figure you’d find a way to destroy something else I loved.”

He flinched, hard enough to send the chair scooting back a few inches. As he looked away, he caught a glimpse of her face, a strange, regretful expression on it. The one she got when she’d let her mouth and temper get away from her. As though she knew the words had been said only to hurt him, regardless of their ring of truth. The silence ached.

At last she said, “So we’re trapped here?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t tried to leave.”

She looked at him in disbelief, then at their surroundings. “Why?”

“I hadn’t found you yet.”

She closed her eyes in frustration. “Whatever. I’m going to take a shower.”

“A shower?”

“There’s one off the dressing room. For the showgirls, I guess. Wash off the sweat and stink between sets.”

He had no answer to this, so he simply watched her get up, head towards the back room on stiff legs. Her hair was greasy in the glow of the stage lights.

He sat motionless as the pipes in the walls groaned with the influx of fresh water. He wondered if any of it was hot. Outside, he could hear the sounds of monsters prowling, the faint howls of agony on the wind.

Once again he was here, a dog returning to its master's side. Like he was still seated at her deathbed. A domesticated sentry on the dumb hope that by its presence it could ward off the howling threat of death and destruction which lurked beyond the threshold.

Had he ever really left? Maybe he was still sitting there, beside her cooling body below that one window. Watching the time tick by and the rot creep in. Would the police find him? Still sitting there? Lost in the borderlands of his own head?

“I’m worried about James.” The words had been spoken in hushed whispers over the landline, a mere nine months after the diagnosis. A soft confession spilled to one of Mary’s old friends from college. “About what’s going to happen to him when I—it’s just…you know what his father is like. He doesn’t have anyone but me.”

He’d sat on the landing below, listening with numb ears to the trickle of words, like little needles in his skin.

You ever going to get a wife, boy?

He had. But he was now doomed to lose her. He’d wondered how silent the house would be without her.

I’m worried about James.

The sound of the shower shut off. He rose and went to sit at the door of the dressing room. Legs folded on the dusty floor as he listened to her clatter around inside, doing something or other.

“Are you okay?”

“Why do you care?”

“How can you ask me that?”

He looked up as she opened the door, and froze.

Maria stood there, blonde hair hanging ragged to her shoulders, a mismatched outfit with a short skirt and scuffed canvas tennis shoes.

“Maria?”

She gave him a strange look. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

He blinked, and then his mind readjusted. She wasn’t Maria. The hair was a touch too long, not edged in pink. Her nails were ragged and unpainted. The knee-length dress was neither black nor white, but dark green. She’d paired it with a faux fur leopard print jacket.

“You dyed your hair?”

She ran her hands through it, damp strands already drying. “They had a box back there.”

“But—why?”

“Because it looked awful, James. And because it was this or shave it all off.”

He had no answer to this.

“If you’re going to hang around, why don’t you make yourself useful and go find something to eat?”

“I don’t know if there is anything.”

“Let me put it this way then: I want some space.”

He got off the floor, dusted the dirt from his jeans. Walked robotically to the door. Paused in the entrance and looked back at her.

She stood in the pool of pink light, the damp fall of her hair curling a bit at the ends, watching him go.

As he walked through the enveloping fog, the radio he’d carried for so long crackled briefly to life. Not static, but music, badly tuned snippets carried on the wind. Crunching guitar chords and a woman’s voice, stripped bare in challenge.

“—get down, real low down—”

He’d heard Mary sing it once, droning along to the radio as they drove through the backcountry. Filling in the words clipped by the spires of ancient mountains older than the trees.

“You listen to Coltrane, derail—own train. Well who hasn’t been there before?”

It had started to rain, fat droplets striking his hair, pinging off his jacket like little pebbles.

“If it makes you happy,” sang the woman on the radio through gargling static. “Then why the hell are you so sad?”

James closed his eyes, and walked off into the fog.

The monster found him on Neely Street.

He shot it, bullets plinking off the angles of the great metal pyramid as it stood unmoving beneath the metal arch of a streetlight, washed of color by the rolling fog and driving rain.

His gun clicked, empty.

He tensed, ready to run, but it didn't move. Stood motionless, watching him.

“I don’t need you,” he said to it. “I know what I did. I’m trying to fix it. I just—”

He broke off, scrubbed his hand across his face, stubble like sandpaper on his palm.

“What do you want?” he said. “My life? You already have it. Do you want me to go back? Confess? Let you strap me into the chair? The gallows? What is it?”

Of course, it didn’t respond. But neither did it approach him. Tentatively, he started to back away. One step, then another.

It moved. Took a step towards him.

He flinched, poised to flee. But then it stopped.

He decided to test something. He turned away from it, slowly began to walk.

He heard it begin to follow, the telltale scrape of the great knife along the asphalt.

He stopped. It stopped. He turned, looked over his shoulder.

They took the upward path, through the still silence, steep and dark, shadowy with dense fog, drawing near to the threshold of the upper world.

It was strange to see it in the open air, the knife by its side leaving a deep gouge behind it in the asphalt of the street. He could see it breathe, he realized for the first time, clouds of vapor curling around and beneath the metal structure of its helmet.

He turned forward, walked on. It followed.

Lacking a true destination, he wandered the streets of the silent town, navigating around deep canyons and high barriers. He heard distant cries in the mist, but saw no other monsters.

No monsters left but you.

He paused for a moment to sit on the porch steps of a narrow townhouse, just under the edge of the overhang which shielded it from the rain. The beast stopped a short distance away, standing motionless. Close, but not threatening.

He crossed his arms and rested his head on his knees. Waited for it to attack him, to leave, to rip off its helmet and make a profound proclamation about life, the universe, and everything.

It did none of these things. He fished out the radio again, began to fiddle with the dial, dancing back and forth along the airwaves, static and words and garbled notes.

“—She calls out to the man on the street, ‘Sir, can you help me?’—”

“—a guy that can’t get no love from me—”

“—cuts me like a knife—”

He shut off the radio and sat in the silence, listening to the fall of the rain.

He could hear it, he realized. The droplets plinking off the metal of the beast’s helmet. A musical marimba on rust, a strangely beautiful contrast to something so hideous.

It shifted slightly, as if it had seen him staring.

And the lord of the shadows, he who rules the joyless kingdom.

On impulse, James rested his hand on the wooden railing of the steps. Began to drum his fingers against it, a counterpoint and complement to the rhythm of the rain against its helmet.

He could feel it, the way the thing’s attention sharpened. He felt it watching as he tapped his palm against the railing, thumping out the rhythm of Huey Lewis and the News. In time with a memory of Mary in the kitchen, baking their first pie together to the sound of the radio, awash in the intoxicating rush of young love.

“All I want from tomorrow,” James sang under his breath. “Is to get it better than today.”

The song was rough, for he did not have the gift of Orpheus. Couldn’t charm the souls of dark things with the beauty of molded grief.

The rain grew heavier, sheeting down in great gouts which doused the rhythm of water on metal. James sighed and let his hand rest on the cold, damp wood. The beast didn’t move.

As he sat in the shelter of the porch, breathing in the cold, moist air, he caught sight of a pair of legs sticking out from underneath a nearby hedge.

There had been bodies of course, here and there. He’d told himself it was a distraction, a horror, to look at them. A deviation from his quest. Disrespectful to the unknown dead. But now, there was nothing stopping him. Nothing to do.

He got up from the porch.

The rain doused him immediately, soaking through his coat and into his shirt, rivulets running through his hair and down the nape of his neck. He approached the corpse and crouched beside it.

The shoes were recognizable, but generic enough to be dismissed. James had never dressed in a way that was particularly memorable.

Gently, he turned the corpse over.

The face was his. Distorted in death and pain, but still him. He stared at it. Thought of all those shoes he’d seen, jutting stiffly beneath bloodied rags and curled next to frozen bodies. He looked up at the beast, still watching him, half-visible in the fog and rain.

“Did you know?” he said.

It neither moved or responded.

“Were you trying to tell me? To get me to understand?”

Still it did nothing. He sat on the asphalt near the corpse, felt the rain start to soak through his pants.

“I don’t know what to do,” he told it. “She hates me, and she should. I don’t regret undoing what I did, but I think I’ve made it worse.”

The beast offered neither advice nor sympathy.

When the rain strengthened, he finally got up, returned to the shelter of the porch. Turned the radio back on and began to blow on his fingers to warm them.

“—sitting up waiting for my sugar to show—” sang the familiar voice of a woman. He recognized it from one of Mary’s vinyl records that she’d brought with her when they’d moved in together. He’d given her a fancy record player for their first anniversary. He’d listen to her sing on lazy afternoons, songs of lying together and talking with a lover.

He stood.

“I think she’s right,” he said to the monster. “We do need to have a talk.”

It watched him silently as he descended the steps. He paused, looked at it.

“I still don’t know what I need to do to find redemption,” he said. “But I’ll try.”

Then he straightened, and strode out into the town.

“It always seems so righteous, at the start,” sang the woman at his breast. “When there’s so much laughter, when there’s so much spark. When there’s so much sweetness in the dark.”

He looked back in time to see the creature vanish into the fog.

He found Mary at a table at Neely's Bar, drinking from a chipped, ceramic mug and listening to a record on the jukebox. The dulcet tones and crystal melody of “Dreams”, by Fleetwood Mac.

“Not Hotel California?” he said, as he entered the diner.

“That joke is almost as awful as this coffee.”

“Where did you get coffee?”

“In the kitchen. There was a can back there. The beans are burned to shit, but it’s hot.”

“Can I have some?”

“It’s in the pot, help yourself.”

He rinsed the dust and sticky residue out of one of the mugs, poured the coffee from the stained pot. He sat down across from her, took a drink. On the jukebox, Stevie sang:

“—like a heartbeat drives you mad. In the stillness of remembering what you had—”

James swallowed the coffee. It burned like battery acid on the way down. “You’re right.”

“About what?”

“Most things. But the coffee is awful.”

“Told you.”

“I’m surprised you’re still here.”

She didn’t answer.

“Mary?”

She took another drink. “I can’t leave.”

His stomach dropped. “What?”

“I walked to the edge of town. I couldn’t make it past the graveyard. It’s like…I go past a certain point, and then I’m walking back into the town.” She looked at him through hollow, exhausted eyes. “I guess that’s cause I’m dead, huh?”

“You’re not though. I—that’s why I took you to the island.”

She gestured vaguely with the cup. “Well I’m here, aren’t I? But whatever you did, I’m stuck.”

“Halfway between worlds,” he said.

She drank the burned coffee in silence.

James curled his hands around the mug and looked out into the foggy street, the shifting features of Silent Hill, the blurred layer that rode over filth and rot and the abyssal dark of things unseen and unknowable. He thought of the sullen lord of shadows, the coin flip that opened the blossom of the delicate, many-petaled flower to reveal the hypodermic fangs of the serpent.

And he knew the answer. It had been staring him in the face the entire time.

“Do you remember the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice?” he said.

She made a face. “Really?”

He didn’t let her dissuade him. “I always found it a little strange. Not because I thought I’d be better. That I wouldn’t look behind, or something stupid like that. I know it was fate. For her to die. For him to go back for her.”

She said nothing.

“I thought it was strange, that he thought he could bargain with Death to bring her back with him. Even then, I knew you couldn’t get anything for free.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I knew that it would have to be an exchange.”

She went still.

He gestured at the fog through the windows. “This place, it’s Purgatory, you see? Or something that the zealots of old would have called purgatory. It keeps a score. An eye for an eye. A life for a life.”

“What are you saying?”

He fished the keys to the car from his pocket, held them out to her. “I’m saying it’s time for you to go home.”

She stared at him, frozen.

Gently, he reached out across the table, took her unmoving hand. Pressed the car keys into the soft palm. “Find Laura,” he said. “And go home.”

“What will you do?” For the first time since he’d raised her, she seemed uneasy, uncertain.

“I’ll stay here. Between worlds.”

She closed her eyes, her expression pained.

“It’s better this way.”

Her hand tightened around the car keys.

“I stand by what I said to Laura,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, as if she was trying not to cry. “But you really can be a bastard sometimes.”

“I know. Thank you for loving me anyway.”

Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I do love you, you son-of-a-bitch.”

He rose to meet her as she stood, bent his head obediently as she rose up on her toes to kiss his cheek, then his lips. A farewell gesture, a purging, the closing of a final chapter.

He watched her walk away. The sway of her coat, the movement of her bleached and dyed hair, and felt a deep sense of satisfaction. She’d be alright.

“Mary?” he called.

She looked back.

“I’m sorry I never brought you back to Silent Hill.”

She nodded, tight, and exited the door. He watched her vanish into the fog.

And the ghost of Orpheus sank under the earth, and recognized all those places of which it had seen before.

The crooning voice of Stevie Nicks wrapped itself around James, as he drank the dregs of bitter coffee, and breathed in the petrichor of the faint and falling rain.

“Thunder only happens, when it’s raining,
Players only love you when they’re playing.
Women, they will come, and they will go,
And when the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.”

As he walked down Nathan Avenue, along the edge of the town, he heard the beast fall into lockstep behind him. In the distance, the cloud waves of endless fog lapped and rolled across the surface of Toluca Lake.

“This whole area used to be a sacred place.”

That’s what Mary had called it. A sacred place. Perhaps she hadn’t been able to yet fathom how sacred did not necessarily mean benevolent.

“Climbing up on Solsbury Hill,” James sang to the empty fog, acapella and off-key. “I could see the city lights.”

A gust of icy wind blew through his hair. He stopped and looked back at the beast, standing in the mist.

This time, he approached it.

It stood motionless as he drew near it, though the huge, metal pyramid tilted slightly, as if in curiosity.

“Thank you,” he said simply. “For helping me to understand.”

Still it made no sound or motion, but a fine tremor suffused it. A letting down, the executioner setting aside his weapon to face the long dark before the dawn gallows.

“I’m grateful,” said James. “That I could correct a mistake. Mary—” He laughed, bitter. “When they first told us. Not the diagnosis, but that it was terminal, I thought—” He swallowed hard. “I thought it should have been me.”

He rubbed his hand over his face, touching the path of her fingers when she’d kissed him that final time.

“And even that was selfish,” he said. “Because Mary—she was the one who knew how to live again. To shed her grief like snakeskin and make herself anew. She’d be the hot widow, her husband taken young, but still plenty of life left. But me…

He blew out a puff of breath into the cold air, curling like smoke. “It was Orpheus who couldn’t live without Eurydice, right?”

The executioner from his nightmares listened to his confession, and said nothing.

“What will I do?” he said. To the beast. To the town. To himself.

Something cold and light landed high on his cheek. A short, sharp kiss which immediately melted and ran, tracing a path down his face like the track of tears. He looked up into the foggy sky.

Snow was falling over Silent Hill.

James stared, in a daze, as the flakes blew thicker, a swirling crystalline dance around him. Softening the shapes of the world. Falling on the cars, blanketing the sidewalks. Falling on the monstrous, implacable shadow which stood beside him.

Snow began to line the jagged edges of the red mask. Filling in the gaps, sharpening the contrast between the pristine snow and filthy, bare metal. Unthinking, James reached up, strangely arrested by the sight.

The beast didn’t move as he touched the mask. Felt the bite of cold metal on his fingers. Watched them smear jagged tracks in the snow that were immediately filled in by the falling flakes.

Years ago, he’d made snow angels with Mary in the woods near their home. They’d destroyed the delicate shapes with their eager tussling, then gone inside and stripped each other naked. Made love on the living room rug, skin cold and damp from the snow. Until the heat from their own bodies dried them. Like fucking a corpse back to life.

James pressed his hands to either side of the beast’s mask, leaving handprints marked into the steep pitch of the pyramid. The icy metal burned his palms. He pressed into the sensation, and then sank to his knees.

The beast didn’t move as he gripped the ragged hem of its bloody apron. Watched implacably as he tugged on it, beseeching.

When it didn’t protest, he lifted the hem, and burrowed beneath it.

The space between its legs was dark and close, and the shape revealed bare and phallic. He touched it with fingers nipped by the snow, and felt it twitch and harden in his palm. Smelled the scent of rust and blood and excitement.

Once, in the rough tumble of their marriage bed, Mary had swiped her thumb across the tip of his leaking cock, and looked at the gleam of fluid in the dim, golden light.

“Have you ever tasted it?” she’d said.

James’s mouth had gone dry, and he’d shaken his head.

Wordless, Mary had pushed her finger between his lips, watching him as he choked on the digit, tasted salt.

“It’s bitter,” he’d said.

Mary had watched him, her eyes unreadable.

“Yes,” she’d said. “It is.”

James bent his head and kissed the crown, the swollen tight tip and the ring of the foreskin, a gesture of obeisance. Felt it cup the back of his head, guiding him into position with surprising gentleness.

He thought of Mary as he sucked, the way she’d sprawled across his spread thighs in the wide, snowy fields of their bed. How she’d cradle him in her delicate palm, safe and warm, as she licked him.

Above him, the beast let out a groan like creaking metal. Its hand tightened on his head and he felt its hips rock.

James closed his eyes.

Time was liminal between its legs. Heat built against his face even as his knees ached from the cold. His jaw began to sting.

He began to withdraw, but the beast stopped him. A firm, scruffing grip on the nape of his neck, that sent a strange, compelling, wave of weakness through his limbs. He sagged against it, pawed at its thighs as it used his mouth. Dimly felt his own cock harden, straining against his trousers.

Deeper. You need it deeper.

Two hands on his head, slick and gloved. It tilted his head as it withdrew, so that on the next thrust, it slid into his throat.

He felt his body seize as the swollen head pushed into him. His eyes streamed, blind in the warm, close dark. The prick of memory, a grainy videotape of a woman, the camera close on her face and neck as a huge cock pushed into her mouth to the root. The tingle of arousal flavored with shame.

The beast stroked his hair the way Mary would as they lay in bed together, and his vision blurred with true tears.

He choked, sobbed, and collapsed at its feet, gasping for air. His head felt tight, dizzy as he cried. Child crying, wrenching and awful and endless.

Filthy hands wiped at his tears and he looked up at it through streaming eyes. It guided him forward, urged him to press his face against its thighs, dry his tears on its filthy apron. He rested his head against the solid wall of it, breathed in pain and breathed out emptiness.

When it urged him to his feet, he went willingly.

There was a red station wagon parked near them, a layer of snow forming on it. It backed him against the car, then gripped him around the hips and lifted him onto the hood.

Dizziness enveloped him, and he was falling backwards, landing with a thump on the metal, legs splayed. The icy cold of the snow soaked his jacket, first the sharp bite of dry flakes, followed by the chill shock as the heat of his body melted it. The beast tugged at his jeans.

Dazed, he helped it, and together they tore them down, leaving him bare-legged and pale, like some cave-dwelling monstrosity. His naked legs poked out from beneath the tails of his shirt, the hem of his jacket.

It folded him in two with ease, angling him for access between his legs. He’d never been in this position before, and he found himself wondering dizzily if this was how Mary had felt each time he did this.

The beast pushed aside its apron, exposing its cock, slick and swollen purple with blood. James’s saliva had already dried, but the head was leaking copious amounts of clear fluid, and he found himself reaching out to touch it.

The beast groaned when he took it in hand, a sound like creaking metal. He slicked the fluid back along the shaft, returned to the head to gather more. Anointing the weapon before battle.

“What?” Mary had whispered in his ear, years ago, as she’d pumped his cock in lube-slick fingers. “You think it’s only for fags?”

He’d never told her how sharp the word had felt. How it slipped between his ribs, in his father’s voice, the mocking tones of boys at school.

You’re not like that. You’re married. You’re normal.

The beastial manifestation of his soul ran cold, gloved fingers up beneath his shirt, touching the skin over his ribs with reverence. The head of its cock pressed against his hole, a slick and obscene kiss.

He breathed out, and it pressed into him.

The entry punched a sound from him, as if he’d been stabbed. The beast groaned above him and withdrew, lingered with the head just inside him, then continued. Each movement brought it deeper, brought them closer. He felt his body stretching to accommodate it, stinging flesh opening up in welcome.

His cock had wilted against his belly, and yet the sensation was strangely pleasant. Their movements began to smooth out, turning slick and easy. Then it nudged up against something inside him on the next, slow thrust and he moaned in shock and pleasure.

Oh god, that’s, I—oh fuck.

The beast continued to fuck him, implacable and unhurried. The thick shape inside him rubbed with unerring accuracy against the spot which sent electric tingles of pleasure down his spine and left him gasping. To his shock, his cock started to plump up once more between his thighs.

“Want to know a secret?” A memory of Mary whispered playfully in his ear. “It’s not length that matters, it’s width.”

He squirmed on it, felt the creature hold him down. The stimulation sent his senses on haywire. He wanted to touch his cock, but couldn’t. The beast captured his hands, locked their fingers, and fucked him deeper.

Oh god, I’m going to—

Yet he didn’t, not yet. The momentum of the creature’s thrusts sent him sliding back and forth across the metal of the hood. He stared into the eyeless mask. Around them, the snow swirled in the encroaching darkness.

“Please,” he said, through frost-bitten lips.

The beast squeezed his hands tightly.

Trembling, he hiked up his legs, burning with the touch of falling snow, and hitched them around the creature’s hips. Rocked into the movement of its thrusts, felt them join, and part, and join again. Moaned in relief as the shaft rubbed deeply, exactly where he needed it, and heard the monster echo him.

So good, so good, I—

The spasm caught him between one breath and the next. He felt his cock jerk, the forceful spill between his thighs. Semen splattered like spilled blood, splashing up onto the creature’s mask in an obscene baptism. His body tightened, and suddenly the thing inside him felt bigger.

The creature groaned and continued to thrust, a strange mix of pleasure and overstimulated pain. He gripped the creature’s hands, tightened his legs around it, urging it on.

“Come on,” he said. “I know what you need. It’s okay.”

It groaned as if in agony; the rhythm of its thrusts skipped.

“I know. It’s okay.” He squeezed his body experimentally around its cock. “I’ve got you. I can take it.”

It jerked inside him, and went abruptly still. The space where they joined grew warm and slick, and he felt a strange flutter of excitement.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s it. Give it to me.”

The creature sagged over him, but caught itself on one arm, holding up the monstrous, metal mask off of him. Clouds of breath steamed in the air around it like smoke from a brazen bull.

He touched the mask gently, kissed the vile thing like a benediction. Continued to touch as it separated their bodies, and helped him down from the hood of the car.

He clung to it as it guided him, blind and half-naked through the driving snow. At first he couldn't fathom where they were going, but then a shadow loomed up ahead of them.

James nearly stumbled up the stairs of the mobile home, but the creature caught him, pushed him upright. He turned to face it at the door.

It stared up at him implacably, too large and angular and inhuman for the mundanity of the space. Something painful squeezed around his heart, and he reached for its hand.

It gave it over, watched as he pressed a kiss across the knuckles, tasting filth and blood and latex. It reached out with its free hand, and touched his cheek.

“Thank you,” he said.

It squeezed his hand, and stepped away into the snow.

James closed the door and stumbled through the icy space of the mobile home. Crawled bare and shivering to the bed and burrowed beneath the down and wool blankets he found there. Kindled his own internal warmth until he stopped shaking, and fell into dreams.

A sharp rap on the window near his head started him awake, and he jerked upright, groping for his gun.

The scowling face of an elderly policeman stared at him through the window. The man frowned at him from under a handlebar mustache and a winter hat with ear flaps.

“You alive in there, son?” he said. His voice was barely muffled by the window.

James couldn’t speak.

“Son?”

He found his voice. “Yes, sorry. You just woke me up.”

“I won’t say I’m sorry. We had a freak snow last night and I’ve seen too many transients end up frozen dead, even with a setup like yours. You okay in there?”

“Yes, I’m—it’s fine.”

The policeman looked dubious. “Alright. I’ll stick the number of the shelter on your window in case you need it.”

“Thank you.”

He listened to the man leave, then crawled out from under the covers and sought his clothing. Did his best to put himself in order and stumbled out into the gray morning light.

Across the street, a shopkeeper was busy unlocking a door. A young woman stepped out of an apartment building and descended the stairs, her ears capped with the headphones of a Walkman, leaving footprints in the powdery snow. A car trundled by, and from the sound of the engine James could tell that the timing chain was going.

He stared, unable to speak, to comprehend. He’d passed willingly into Purgatory, but this was not it. He began to wander down the avenue, dazed and confused.

He ended up at Neely’s Bar.

The place seemed normal enough, an active kitchen and a few patrons lingering at the end of the lunch rush. The condemnation scrawled in blood above the jukebox had vanished. He found some crumpled bills in his wallet, ordered a lunch omelet and toast with a coffee.

He ate and drank in silence, savoring the fluffy eggs, the salt of the butter, and the bitter, milky coffee, and wondered what he should do.

In the end, he walked the streets until dark, and then retreated to the mobile home for warmth and sleep.

Three days he spent like this, scavenging or purchasing resources, organizing the little space. He washed in the mobile home’s minuscule shower, learned to drain and refill the tank. Read the spidery, scattered messages of its previous occupant, the little breadcrumbs of madness. He focused on mundane tasks to keep the buzzing in his mind quiet.

On the morning of the third day, he awoke to enveloping fog.

He found the beast on his doorstep, standing unmoving, like a great statue in the mist. He went to it.

They walked the empty streets, shadow-in-shadow, as unseen monsters lurked and cried in the mist. He led it to Rosewater Park.

They walked the lakeside walk to the pier, then he led it back into the blooming, wild tangle of the garden.

It fucked him at the base of the statue of the Lady of Light, gloved hands pressed to the skin of his back as he rode it. Sweat cooling on the nape of his neck and the smell of lake water in his nostrils, as he rocked the head of its cock against his prostate until he came all over its chest. Then he hid his face in the beast’s broad shoulder, eyes squeezed tight as he circled his hips, urging it to spill in him.

They laid entangled for a time, James overheated face pressed against the rough, cold metal of the mask, and then it urged him up. Took him down to the lakeshore and they bathed together. Ritual ablutions from a time long forgotten. It walked him home in the dark.

The pattern continued. He passed in and out of Silent Hill like a ghost, a transient shimmer among townsfolk. He ate, walked, and watched.

Then the fog would return, and like monstrous Persephone, he would go to lie with Death. They made their marriage bed in gardens and hidden alleys, in the garages and abandoned apartment buildings of Purgatory. He walked the monster to the ruins of Neely’s Bar and played it music as it sat on the doorstep in the chill of the falling rain. Perhaps it would always be this way. Between worlds.

Yet each time he stared into the enveloping fog across the lake, each time he heard the windborne howls of things unseen, each time he descended the steps to greet the beast which lurked within, he felt at peace. Lost in the restless dream of Silent Hill.