Chapter 7: Simulation

There was nothing to be seen. The mist was impenetrable, impregnable, alive and dead, an entity all its own. Itzak walked from the rear wheel of his car forward. He was perspiring, sweating, his heart tripping over itself in crushing, mounting anxiety.

How long had he been walking?

He tossed a look over his shoulder, picking up the pace, the same as he had done a dozen times. The car had disappeared into the grey long ago. Now he checked his watch, the same as he had done two dozen times before, and once again he found no solace in the same answer that he had reached in each of those instances – that it had stopped inexplicably at 3:33 a.m.

He couldn't say why he was afraid, why he pulled his heavy coat around him even though his skin tasted nothing.

There! There was something glistening ahead. He broke into a full run, his spirit soaring at the sudden change in the tableau of road and fog. But as he neared it, something deep and fundamental inside him stirred and his feet ceased running.

After a solid minute of staring without cease, Itzak came to realize that he was staring at the headlights of his own car.

"… impossible…"

The car door in the distance before him opened. Helplessly the man watched himself exit the vehicle, turn, and calmly walk away, dissolving into the distant mist.

Silence.

He never ran as fast as he did then.

Itzak didn't stop when he reached the tail lights of his car, not even as he superseded it. In fact, the only thing that stopped him was the first street sign that he had seen in hours.

"Welcome to Silent Hill"

Heaving, he caught his chest, breathing painfully, his tendons screaming, mouth wide agape, vision utterly captured by the sign, its bonelike letters offering no answer in their green spaces.

The wildest explanations of his psyche couldn't explain what he had just seen. Quiet terror paralyzed his attempt to venture back. So rather, he went forward, gritting his teeth, pulling the trench coat still tighter. He could not think; all of his thoughts were utterly erased by the sheer inconceivability of what he had just witnessed. He feebly reached into his pocket, searching with clattering hands for a cigarette. He had left them in the car.

"Damn…"

He was not going back. It is amazing how powerfully the human mind can bind to denial in the presence of irrationality. Itzak found himself alone on a street which had opened into the murky vision of a town. He picked up the pace; on either side of him he could see the teeth of shattered fences glinting in the grayness, their "Do Not Enter" signs pushing quietly against his presence. Beneath Itzak's feet, thick blades of gnarled grass had begun to sprout from in between the cracks of the ruined concrete; how they did this without the presence of sunlight was a secret shared only by the most pallid denizens of the world's dark places. The man looked upwards. The sky was entirely veiled by the cinereal mist which blanketed everything. It's colorlessness suffocated him, his eyes thirsted for color; wine red, egg blue, all defunct in this endless expanse of obscurity. Every surface was indistinct; he could barely read the peeling letters on the facades of the long abandoned shops flanking his left and right.

After a while, he turned slightly, walking past some knocked over trash bins to cross onto the sidewalk to attempt to pry into one of the storefronts.

Something on the sidewalk caught his eye. Itzak stopped. He knelt down, examining a reddish-brown stain upon the ashen asphalt. Over time he came to the realization that he was staring at what was obviously "fresh" dried blood in a completely abandoned town. Something inside him stirred, he suddenly felt ice cold - his skin welted up around his hairs. The word tumbled thoughtlessly out of his lips.

"…..Rain?"

He snapped erect, azure eyes searching, the lines in his face deepening inward. There was the panic again, theiced horror that he could barely restrain.

"Are you here?''

The city was unresponsive. The man shuddered, pulling again at his coat, a touch obsessively. His calm veneer had cracked.

He called her name. Nothing.

"I'm losing goddamn mind."

He ran his hands through his longish hair, lips parted in incredulity, staring at the stain. People couldn't be two places at once, they just couldn't. His mind was bereft of answers. He was pissed.

"Helping strangers, look where it got me…"

But words couldn't change a thing.

Defeated, his eyes fell once more upon the aged concrete. Itzak saw that the blood splatter lead away towards the pavement before him. He burst into a jog, his neurons firing, his system absolutely screaming for nicotine; he followed the trail of blood dutifully for the pure lack of any superior bearing. He followed the lengthening stains and drips that appeared to have been left by a wound while moving until he came to a set of crumbling stone steps beneath a flickering neon marquis.

His mouth fell open. He plunged his hand into his breast pocket and slowly extracted the tattered blue door tab.

"The Grand Hotel…"

Itzak's eyes surveyed the steps and he recoiled instinctively. Three foot scratch marks were etched into the solid stone. The trail of blood lead up to crumbling double doors that had long since lost their grandeur; the brass handle glittered from beneath a sickly red-brown handprint. Itzak approached it as though cancerous, forcing himself up the stairs, avoiding looking at the deep-etched scratches, and placed his hand over the print for size.

His stomach sank. The handprint was definitively small.

His skin growing cold, crawling, every single sense protesting – his hand moved upward, drawn to handle as if by a magnet. His fingers once again clasped around another frosty handle, another unfamiliar door, another bad situation.

It turned.

He closed his eyes, focusing on the cold metal, not knowing what was on the other side. Exhaling deeply, he calmed himself, and made the call.

It opened.

As the door shut behind him, every last ounce of light dissipated out of the room. Itzak was standing alone in the pitch blackness. Slowly, he reached inside of his coat and retrieved his last lifeline, the penlight. The darkness parted from its small but resilient beam; biting his lip, gritting his teeth, Itzak breathed again, focusing on the narrow path of illumination before him and thrust himself again into the unknown, damned if he was going to give up now. Swallowing his fear he broke back into a jog, in pursuit of the blood. He was lead out into a great hall; the feeble light of his penlight dissolved in the enveloping darkness. The walls themselves were falling apart, the sagging ceiling was stained with moisture seeping down from above, rebar jutted in places like the blackened skeleton of some hideous ancient behemoth – casting twisted shadows over the balding carpet. Although he shivered to his core, the man would not betray his pride.

The whole place smelled wrong. His nose wrinkled upwards, sensing something hideous in the air. Itzak crossed the room surgically, one foot before the other, his senses alive, inching towards the haggard lift that stared at him from across the space. The button was blood splattered; his skin crawled as he shone his light upon the broken, unlit button and spied more panicked female handprints of dried blood. He craned his head upwards toward the empty shaft; the elevator had stopped on one of the floors above him, completely obscured by the solid sheet of gloom thickly clinging to every surface.

A bloodcurdling wail pierced him to the soul.

Ears ringing, Itzak jumped nearly three feet into the air. Upon landing, he stumbled, his heart beating wildly; instantly he was drenched in sweat, without thinking he called out-

"RAIN!"

Silence.

"RAIIIN!"

Although in his state he had no sure way of knowing in what direction the cry had originated from, Itzak exploded towards the double doors to his left. Emulsified with rubble, Itzak began to wildly tear away at stone, filth, and spare wood with his bare hands, ripping towards the doors as fast as he possibly could. At last he heard it again – helplessly he paused, ears shattered once more by an unmistakably female scream; a long, pained howl cracked by an audible sob. He slammed his ear against the door, his body racing, feeling as if he couldn't get enough air, he was sure of it now – against all reason she was in there.

He called her name, helplessly, throwing his weight against the doors. He heard it again – far fainter, a voice soaked with tears. In hysterics, he threw himself again into the door, again – he backed up, reared up his foot, and kicked with every ounce of strength he could muster. The jammed doors blasted open, slivers of rotting wood rocketed into the abyss of the room that confronted the man now.

He was a quiet man. He was a reserved man; a pianist, a scholar, a foreigner who had built a life on raw talent, a husband and a teacher. In spite of his crippling anxiety and even in spite of his vices he had one thing at his core, one gift; the card which had never before failed him. Nothing was going to stop him now.

But there were also some things that Itzak just didn't know.

It was an auditorium. Or at least, it had been. Itzak burst through, running with all of his might, trench coat flying, by some horrid trick of adrenaline his sense of time suddenly became grinding and sickeningly slow. What seemed like thousands of the ghostly outlines of empty chair after empty chair whistled past him as he descended down the amphitheater seating, hurtling toward the pit; a wicked black moat around the corpse of a once stately stage, rising into focus from the blackness - a rotten platform swathed in withered velvet drapes stained black with mold.

Itzak stopped by a force more powerful than his drive, inertia sending him flying over his own feet; his mouth fell open involuntarily in unadulterated horror. Spread before him in center stage was a nightmare of almost inconceivable proportions. An uncontrollable human scream escaped his lips; he clasped his hands to his mouth, eyes unable to peer wider.

Two figures writhed entwined from beneath the blazing light of a single spotlight; through their paroxysms of movement where female ended and male began lay on the brink of indistinguishable. Atop the famished cadaver of a grand piano lay a distorted white figure, prone, glistening with perspiration, a female back arched impossibly far backwards, a snowy face obfuscated beneath a net of obsidian hair, wrists and arms bent at wrong angles as they clasped onto the edges of the piano. His agonized eyes slipped up wrongly seductive thighs rested vertically upon the torso of a colossal male, upon which delicate ankles rammed into terrible steel contraptions lasciviously clung to massive scarred shoulders standing nearly 7 feet high. The male held the female close to him as he violently took her, with one brusque hand clasped around a milk white throat miniature in comparison, the other viced around the sharp curve of her hip and waist.

He undulated, sending waves through her as she absorbed the pulse of each exertion, which was framed by a floor length drape of human flesh. The female cried out, her head rolling back sensuously – whether from pain or pleasure was indecipherable. Unable to tear his eyes away, Itzak succumbed to the single tortured realization that he recognized the figure beneath the monster.

"NOOOOOOOO!"

The thing stopped its thrusting though its hands continued to grasp his female at the throat and waist; her body arced downward, exhausted, her bare chest heaving with small strained breaths. Quite slowly, it turned its massive helm to look at the man standing in turbulence on the floor beneath the stage.

Itzak was not deceived, some untold instinct stirred within his core that whispered to his logical brain the fatal truth – that what he was looking at was far from human. Itzak froze as it reared its head to look him in the eye; in one resounding, horrible moment Itzak laid sight upon the blasphemy of ironwork where the creature's head should have been; a pointed absurdity of metal too huge to lay upon mortal shoulders. While he couldn't see its eyes, Itzak felt the wraith locked him in its gaze, daring him to react even in the slightest.

Neither male moved.

Though the Russian stood solid as stone, the Pyramid could taste the sharp musk of his fear from across the space that divided them. He savored it in this long moment; he relished it over his black tongue – detecting delicate notes of past corruptions forcefully whitewashed with decades of learned purity. Inside, the Pyramid reviled – the man's sins were simply too faint to sustain him. In his hand he felt his female languish, her hair gliding over his muscled wrist, barely conscious from the strain of their fornication.

Images passed before the Tormentor; slender hands playing the piano, carnal-red ribboned love letters written, hidden and never sent; the cold gleam of a gilt wedding band.

Her memories belonged to him now, and they served him well.

The Pyramid did not break his gaze; the tawny swain before him was her unreturned love. His black soul seethed with rancor; the crowned head of revenants had nothing but contempt for those unlucky enough to interrupt his pursuit of kingly pleasure.

With supreme maliciousness the Pyramid threw her by her hair in one movement from the piano.

Itzak's stomach blazed with fire – without thinking he charged the stage, clearing the gap in mere seconds. He was alive with hatred, with disgust by the brazenness of the monster's insult. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the small, quivering shadow of a female cowering beneath the destroyed piano; naked white skin struck against ink-blots of black strands of hair. The Russian in one swipe unsheathed the revolver and fired into the monster's gut.

The monster stood as steady as stone. Horror crossed European features.

A second shot. Nothing.

Eyes wide open, the infinitely smaller man threw himself out of the crashing force of a knife no mortal could carry. Itzak landed hard on his knees and rolled over, organs firing; the monster leered over him, twisting the crowned helmet of demons towards him from so high above. Itzak scuttled beneath the piano, desperately grabbing at Rain, but his hands caught nothing but hair. She snapped away from him, her limbs shrinking and twitching from his hands.

"What the hell is wro-COME WITH ME! NOW RAIN, NOW!LOOK AT ME DAMMI-"

Black eyes sparkled in the shade.

"My god…"

Beneath a torrent of bedraggled hair was the canvas of a face that was not the same as he remembered. Her eyes, glittering amidst their spindly blood vessels, bore into his being like an axe striking home. His heart stopped, time stopped – he felt, and all the feeling in his organs knew, all in a cold instant, that he was not looking at a person, but something altogether unfamiliar sheathed in the skin of his student.

"Please….Itzak….Run away…" came her small voice, cracked with tears, as she cowered away from him deeper into the shadows.

"No! No! I came here for you! We have to go, god we have to go!" He pleaded with her desperately; in terror he could hear the screech of the Monster's knife sliding closer and closer. He cupped his hand around her thin ankle – it was freezing cold.

"Jesus, COME ON!" he screamed, as he heard the swing of the blade rising up. Terrorized, he threw himself on her as a human shield as the horrific crash of the knife smashed into the top of the instrument, cleaving it into a thousand shards.

And there he was, shielding her in that moment when the splinters of wood seemed to pause in the air like raindrops in a photograph as they lay in the shadow of the monster above them. His ears heard nothing, perhaps a faint hum as milliseconds melted to hours – all was dark but the light gleaming off of the bloodstained blade raising higher once again in the suddenly impossibly slow world. He clutched her to his chest, in that last moment he looked into eyes wreathed in tears, she was saying something that he could not hear.

A siren cut the silence.

Like melting ice, he watched the white leave her eyes.

The siren pounded, deafening. As the floor peeled away to reveal its hell-wrought skeleton, as the lamplight turned to blood, as grey became black, as mist became night, in that moment, he watched the thin veil of female skin beneath his fingers shift.

Before he could react, long, thin arms encircled his body like cement.

"Itzak….Please…Let me die."

At the last syllable, he no longer recognized her voice.

Utterly paralyzed, diamond-hard claws unsheathed from her elongating hands, more like knives than nail. He tried to scream, but his body was limp – his entire will evanesced away by some unseen energy. Her flesh was winter - he shivered violently; he could not tear his sight away from her transforming face, from the ink black eyes losing their softness.

The Tormentor paused, staring down at the man and his lithe captor. Her whiteless gaze leered upwards at him; unblinking , unmoving, burning cold fire. Her blackening mouth opened into a sneer, revealing a chasm of needles framed with hideously sensuous lips. Tears of fear rolled down Itzak's face as he caught a glance of her reflection in the highly lacquered surface of a splintered piece of piano. Wrongly, beauty clung to her wicked form as a sweet dream precedes a nightmare. Her humanity was forgotten.

Pyramid turned his knife slowly, catching the light, sliding it slowly across the grated floor. The steel sang its wretched choir.

No one moved.

In a flash, the Master of Death swung his great knife high.

From each pore of her deathly skin emerged a razored-wire, acting under autonomic control. Like a sea urchin, a halo of ten thousand coldly shining wires surrounded the kneeling creature and her captive, shielding them in a storm of movement. Enraged, the Pyramid lunged his great knife, cleaving into them in an awesome crash. Faster than the eye, the wired swirled faster and faster, forming an impenetrable sphere around the creature and Itzak. The Great Knife screamed as its steel was mauled by the writhing wires-like serpents hundreds of them reached away from the shield-sphere like a sickening arm and sliced around the knife, encircling and pulling it and its owner into the roaring storm of razors. The Pyramid screamed in rage as she and her wires ripped him closer and closer into the blades of her terrible blender of slicing metal hairs. The wires parted like two curtains, revealing her unmoving stare, framed with hair, as she hungrily watched the struggling Tormentor. Dozens of immeasurably long wires shot from her terrible form, flying towards the Pyramid, whipping around the enormous biceps of the beast that pulled upon the hand of the terrible blade. Her sardonic smile widened slightly, her needle-teeth and black eyes shining with unearthly delight as the living wires pulled tight around her opponents arm, slicing into black muscle, drawing rivulets of monstrous life-blood. The Pyramid roared in deafening torture as she pulled tighter, deep into this arm, down to the bone.

They were rising – hundreds of wires shot down towards the floor and pushed, raising them high as she formed them into six swirling-solid legs, jointed like a spider. Wires wrapped around the Russian's body, helplessly he was raised high above her head in a cocoon of steel and gently set onto the floor behind her. As the last wire slipped away, he felt breath seize him – Itzak sank to the ground, free, yet rooted to the spot at the catastrophic horror of the scene before him.

She would need her arms for this.

The pyramid screamed, a deafening bestial roar that shook the walls. In misery, the great form faltered, his great muscles spasming – the gargantuan knife clattered to the floor. The hair-wires swirled faster and faster, snaking around his knees and arms, spraying blood in clouds. At last, with a final pull, she brought him to his knees.

Razorwires germinated from the tips of her toes, enveloping her feet in a torrent until at last she stepped gracefully with an ankle that ended in a buzzing meatgrinder of thin blades four feet long. A vacant smile formed upon her black lips as she looked down at the struggling monster. With a long needled foot, she gently swept the Butcher's blade out of her hallowed path. Rearing his pyramidal helmet to crane a glimpse at her, the monster struggled with his bulging arms to tear at her, his fingers grasping nothing but air.

In a swipe, the wires holding his arms slammed him down onto the floor, his helmet banging mercilessly into the fiery grate beneath them. Unsmiling, unfeeling, she raised her long leg high and brought it down with precision onto the monster's back. Putting her weight forward on her needled foot, it sliced into his flesh as she leaned down near to the subdued and tortured Pyramid, close enough to slide a shapely finger down the ridge of his bowed helm. The Pyramid struggled in vain, his tireless muscles heaving, yet the more he resisted, the farther in she cut until he her feel her sawing to his bones.

With a single finger she lifted his helmet from beneath. She smiled into him.

I want you to remember this moment.

She lifted her other hand as it split into countless razors. Mercilessly, she reached under his helm, seeking his tongue.

I want to forgive you, but I need something in return.

The wires invaded him, slipping beneath the helmet, prying open his mouth.

I want you to know that I've enjoyed our time together.

The wires pierced his tongue, he tried to scream, but she pulled it suddenly and it stifled him.

I should thank you…

She was pulling harder – he felt the flesh tearing –

I have never known such pleasure…