Heaven's Night

Rain of Brass Petals

Time rapidly slipped away, dwindling like an hourglass, but not in the sense that it was running out. More like the glass had turned into a loop, and the sands were spinning endlessly in a cycle that never ended. Every day was different, and yet it was mind-numbingly the same until it reached a point where he was not even bothered by it anymore. Everything in his life had seemed to turned into the same, monotone gray as the persistent fog that blanketed the town of Silent Hill.

He had wandered, for a little while. Walking amidst the streets, feeling as isolated as if he was in the middle of the ocean, considering he could only see a few feet in front of him at any given time, with the buildings flanking him on the road rising as huge silhouetted behemoths. Despite that, it had rarely been quiet, as one might expect. He could hear shuffling, moaning, and heavy panting, along with the occasional sound of click-click, like long nails upon pavement. All of it was enough to make the skin crawl. And on more rare occasions, he heard the distant scraping of the pyramid-headed woman's enormous sword as she dragged it across the ground. Usually this was accompanied by one of the other noises falling silent.

The figures that found him, the nurse, followed him, though only made herself known at the strangest of times. Once when he thought his loneliness would eat him alive, right before he found the Wood Side Apartments.

The sign leaped out at him by chance, and he found himself stopping in front of it and staring for several minutes before he began moving. Not to keep walking, but to go inside. He did not expect the front door to work, except it did.

He had the strange, deeply unsettling feeling, that the door had unlocked itself for him, though. As if it would be locked for anyone else, but he was a special exception to the rule.

The empty, almost desiccated, building spread out for him like an open husk of a corpse, gutted, with scraps of skin and muscle still clinging to long dead bone. The carpet was old, but not dusty. The wood around him creaked and sighed, almost as if sagging, but when he blinked it was straightened again. He could not tell what was wrong—if it was in disrepair due to long age, or if the place was vandalized in the past and had never been repaired. Somehow, it seemed to be both and neither at the same time. The age of many years was upon the innards of the apartments, and while they were not collapsed yet, something told him no one would ever live here again. It was...frozen.

He wandered the halls, curious but uncertain, and tried to first door he saw.

His breath ripped from him in a gasp as the shadowy figure of a woman spun around to look at him, terror in every piece of movement. There was another figure near her too, parting as if caught in the act of something, a man he thought, for it was larger, but before he could even apologize for intruding she was gone like that. Like smoke in the wind.

It left him staring in puzzlement, wondering what had happened and if—what he had seen was real. He had never before seen anything in this town so far that had even hinted at the existence of other people, other humans, except the human-shaped monsters. So, what was that? A ghost? He did not believe in ghosts, yet...his eyes glanced around the room, desperately seeking for answers, in a place that could provide none.

Despite what he had just seen, the room felt—and looked—as if it had not been lived in for a very long time. There was a layer of dust upon the TV, and the grayness of the bedsheets seemed due to age. It somehow felt as if he had opened a bubble into a place that was otherwise undisturbed and trapped in—in something.

There was a book upon a nightstand, which he picked up. The leather was black, and there was no title anywhere to be found. But there was a symbol in red upon the cover that he did not understand. Circles within circles, an eye at the top, staring balefully at him, and dozens of weird symbols written all within the circles. Or perhaps it was some strange alphabet? He stared at it, uncomprehending and confused, before he flipped open the book to read the first page.