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Lost.
That was the word which kept echoing through Mary’s skull, tolling like a funeral bell, as she made her way through Rosewater Park: lost. The bright and peaceful town she knew from memory and half-forgotten dreams; the friendly faces of its townsfolk; the quaint storefronts and cheerful rowhouses; all broken, ugly, shattered. Lost in the fog. Gone.
And there was James, of course. But then, that was why she was here.
Not for the first time, Mary wondered just what on earth happened during the last three years, to turn Silent Hill from a sunny resort town into this…what could one even call it? A waking nightmare? A ghost story? A sick dream? The pain, that was real – not just the ever-present ache of dull needles in her legs and chest, every one as familiar to her as an old friend, but fresh pains that still smarted and stung: a patch of acid-scalded skin on one hand, tender spots smattering her arms and back that she was sure were already coloring purple-blue-green underneath her floral dress and sensible knit jumper.
Pain was nothing new to Mary. Pain could be borne. As for the prospect of dying – actually, really dying in this town – well, that was nothing new either. She had been staring death in the face for years. Death had red, blotchy skin, stringy brown hair that was still too short to tie back, and sometimes left rust-brown stains on the sheets after falling out of bed in the morning. At least now she had options – and the barest sliver of agency. It was a gift. It would cut her fingers to the bone. She wasn’t about to let it go to waste.
Mary could almost feel grateful to the monsters…almost. When she wasn’t puking, or flailing, or scrabbling in the muck, anyways.
While one hand continued to maneuver her stalwart, reinforced cane (just as familiar a presence as the pain which necessitated it) over the cobblestones, the other absently reached into the pocket of her sweater, skirting briefly over rounded plastic before finding the crinkled edges of a piece of paper, much-worn. Mary grasped it lightly, ran her fingers back and forth over the rough surface once or twice; that was all. She didn't need to take the paper out to read what was on it. She already had it memorized, down to the thickness of the penstrokes.
In my restless dreams, I see that town. Silent Hill. I know I promised to take you there again, someday. And I never did. Well, I'm alone there now – in our special place – waiting for you.
Mary had read somewhere (likely an article buried deep within three years' worth of accumulated hospital magazines) that it was impossible to read, in dreams; if you tried, the page would be covered in gibberish, or outright blank. It was supposed to be a way of distinguishing reality from fantasy, or allowing one's consciousness to regain control of the dream. And no matter how many times Mary reopened the plain envelope (labeled, in the same careful writing, "James") and scanned the contents, the text of the letter remained obstinately legible. So that was real, too.
Thirty-six words. One for every month since her diagnosis. One for every month without her James. Of course she would go find him. She just hadn't decided whether she would kiss him or kill him once she did.
A shadow loomed out of the fog at the corner of her eye, startling Mary from her reverie, and she reflexively turned, clutching her cane close to her chest in a half-instinctive gesture of protection. (She’d tried to avoid using it in that way , now that she had the tiny snub-nosed revolver sitting like a heavy stone in her purse; the cane was far more useful for her mobility than as a weapon, and if it were to break she'd be in real trouble.) But the tension slowly bled out of her as her eyes further pierced the damp mist, noting first the shadow’s frozen stance, then its stony texturing. A statue, that was all: a hooded woman, her head bowed in prayer and supplication. Mary leaned closer, propping her arms on her cane for support as she read the underlying inscription. Victim of persecution by (...something; the text here was worn away, an act of time or deliberate vandalism) Jenn— Carroll lived with pride and honor. What happened here shall never be forgotten.
This was an old place; she remembered how it had impressed her when she and James had visited years before, all the history hiding away in this sleepy little town. Where did it all go?
Croatoan, Mary thought with a shudder. Dead tree branches clattered like fingerbones over her head, and the rising wind, while doing little to dispel the omnipresent fog, still seemed to cut right through her to the core. (For God’s sake, why had she decided to come to a lakeside town in the middle of Maine during the off-season in nothing but a buttoned sweater and a dress that barely reached her knees? She must not have been thinking. She must have been thinking of James.) She had to keep moving. So Mary did, hurrying insofar as she was able to past dried-up fountains and overgrown terraces, mind whirling with ghost towns and lost souls.
The chill in the air was worse when she emerged from the park, away from the relative shelter of ivy trellises and hedges gone to seed, but she made up for it by walking faster; the wooden boards of the tiny boardwalk at the lake’s edge were still in good condition, and made for easier terrain than the rough-hewn cobblestones she’d left behind. This increase in speed also required her to divert her attention toward the delicate logistics involved in maneuvering her infirm limbs, and she half-noted that at least some of that nameless dread was beginning to ebb, despite the gloomy fog. Tap-step, step, tap-step, step. She always did feel better when she was near water. Tap-step, step, creak of boards beneath her feet, quiet slapping of waves against the beams. Tap-step, step. She could hardly make out the surface of the lake at all, shrouded as it was in a sea of undulating gray, distorted reflection to the waters below. Like the color of a television set, tuned to a dead channel. Tap-step, step. But Mary didn’t need to see the lake to know that it was there – just as she didn’t need anything more than three cryptic lines of a letter to know that James was here, too. Waiting for her…somewhere.
She reached the small outdoor cafe without spotting a single living soul (nor any dead souls, either): just empty chairs, benches, tables, and the occasional relic of some bygone summer. A newspaper folded in half, so browned with age and rot that she couldn’t read anything on it. Two upturned ice cream cones, their contents long since dissipated. The faintest jostling of burned-out lights strung from lamppost to lamppost. Old, unhappy, far-off things that, in the absence of anything notably monstrous, just made Mary feel sad . The letter was right about one thing; Silent Hill had been a special place, once upon a time. Now…?
(It’s sick. It got sick, so everybody left, and now it’s all alone. You know how it is. Don’t you, Mary?)
With a smooth, practiced motion, Mary slid the wrist strap of her cane from one hand to the other, just for the sake of giving her poor arm a break, before leaning on it slightly as she dug in her purse for the battered visitor’s guide she’d picked up on the way into town. She’d checked the whole park, she was sure – on foot, even, as cumbersome as it was, because she was still just a little too uneasy about calling out blindly to a place where she had no idea what was listening to her. The waterside was empty. Where else could he be? Mary refolded the map with perhaps less care than she might typically show, stuffed it back in her purse, and let out a sigh that felt as heavy as the fog. This was crazy. It was crazy to think James would write to her now. It was crazy to think he would only write. Hadn't he vowed, after all, to have and to hold her, in sickness and in health? Hadn't he been the one to vanish so completely and so thoroughly that if she didn't have pictures she might very well believe he had never even existed? Hadn't she spent her entire convalescence carrying the weight of not one grief but three – grief for herself, for him, and for everything in between?
Three years of moving and breathing and slowly dying, while half of her heart was gone. His letter didn't even have an apology. Maybe she was just crazy for not tearing it into pieces.
There was a gazebo, Mary remembered, at the far end of a single wooden pier extending out over the lake. She and James had spent nearly the whole day there, his arm around her waist, sometimes chatting about nothing she could now remember, mostly just watching the sunlight dance over the waves. Mary's white flats scuffed against the boards as she turned to consider the pier. Now, in the midst of this gray silence, it looked like a bridge going nowhere. Maybe it was. But the gazebo – if it still existed – would at least let her take a load off her feet, if not her mind.
The planner for Rosewater Park likely hadn’t had sick women with canes in mind when envisioning their idyllic spot for rest and relaxation, but Mary was grateful for the walkway railing anyways, brushing her free hand against it for extra support as she kept her gaze low to the ground and took care with planting each careful step. She couldn’t bear to look up yet, couldn’t bear to hope. She'd gone perhaps ten or twelve paces before a vaguely steepled silhouette began to emerge ahead, and it was a few steps more before Mary’s willpower finally broke and she chanced an upward glance. And there, in the shadow of the eaves, suspended perfectly between shafts of pale splintered wood whose paint had nearly flaked away –
"James?"
Time stopped. Her breath hung motionless in the air. She hadn't known she would speak until the word was already flown from her mouth, and it had been so long since she'd said his name aloud that she almost recoiled at the half-bitter, half-strange taste of it on her tongue. The cane wobbled under a trembling hand. She knew the slope of his shoulders, the curl of hair just behind his ears, but she'd forgotten how to walk.
Mary was floating. Mary was falling. Mary, somehow, made her way forward, towards the man leaning over the gazebo railing, back to her, looking out at the expanse of pure and white nothing.
Then the man turned around – and that precious moment of suspended, frozen time fell out of the air, and shattered at Mary's feet.
Wide brown eyes met stormcloud gray, and (hazel – James's eyes had been hazel – a wife couldn't forget something like that, and oh how she had loved his eyes, the way he'd squint and tilt his head at something to get a better look, the tiny crinkles at the corners when on rare occasions he'd –) almost instantly, the man's face cracked into a lazy grin. For one horrible moment, Mary was certain he was laughing at her.
“Sweetheart,” he said, “if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’d just seen a ghost.”
This man was a stranger. This man could be James’s twin. But that didn’t make sense, James had been an only child – James had never smiled so easily – James –
“I – I’m sorry,” Mary murmured, briefly hiding her face behind her free hand, just long enough for her to squeeze her eyes tightly closed, once, and open them again. When she drew her hand away, the man was still there, arms crossed as he leaned against the railing, but she could at least bear to look at his face and still breathe. His hair was just a few shades too dark, and it didn’t fall into his face. “It’s just…you look like –”
“Like your boyfriend?” the man said, and Mary nearly dropped her cane. At her expression, one corner of the man’s mouth tugged upward, the beginnings of a sly smirk.
“My – husband, actually,” said Mary, too shocked by the man’s temerity to even think of something other than the truth.
Then the man actually did laugh, rich and warm and hardly teasing her at all. “That’s good,” he said, “that’s really good, I’ve never heard that one before.” He leaned a little further back, closing his eyes, almost contemplative. “‘My husband,’” he repeated, slowly, savoring it.
“I’m serious, you look just like him,” Mary insisted. She was already pawing through her purse, the beginnings of a puzzled grimace gathering between her brows. “I have a picture – somewhere –”
There was a hand on her shoulder, a bloom of warmth and comfortable weight. Mary blinked and looked up, lips half-parted in surprise. “My name,” he said, “is Jason.” His mouth twitched again; amiable or arrogant, she couldn’t quite tell. “I don’t need to see his picture. Not if I look just like him. Right?”
He was standing close. Too close. Mary awkwardly shrank away, fumbling slightly with her cane. She glanced him up and down, an action meant to reorient herself but instead only sending her deeper into a surreal daze. Was that a biker jacket he was wearing? And leather pants? Jason, peering down to catch her gaze, must have noticed where she was looking, because his face broke into a decidedly lascivious smirk. “And I think maybe,” he said, in a low, provocative purr, “you like what you see. Hm, angel?”
Sweetheart. Angel. James never used pet names. He never had to. Just “Mary” was enough for him, and with the way it echoed in his mouth, every time like a promise or a melody or a prayer renewed, it had been enough for Mary as well. “I-I’m sorry,” she stammered, furious with herself but unable to still the quaver in her voice, the trembling in her limbs, “but I think I have to go.” She turned, and her head kept spinning past her shoulders. The breath that she hastily sucked in was immediately expelled as a grating, searing cough. Oh, hell, not now, Mary thought tiredly, before she felt her feet collapse beneath her –
She didn’t have time to reach the ground before a pair of strong arms caught her, gripping her gently around the waist. “Woah, woah, take it easy,” said a warm voice in her ear, before gingerly dragging her a couple feet and seating her, with a rather curious sense of courtesy, on the nearby bench. Through an out-of-focus haze she caught a glimpse of – Jason? – almost as an afterthought, leaning down to pick up her cane. Mary closed her eyes, reached into the sweater pocket where she kept the letter, pulled out something round and plastic that she unscrewed before dumping its contents into her hand. Her eyes opened. At the edge of her view, she saw Jason’s leg stretched out languorously, and the cane propped up on the bench between them. Like a chaperone, she thought, and managed to stop the near-hysterical laughter bubbling within her by throwing two pills in her mouth and swallowing them in a rush. The rest of the pills went back in the bottle. There weren’t that many of them left.
Then, and only then, did she turn to look at Jason, still clutching the pill bottle between shaky fingers. He had his hands clasped behind his head and was staring off into the distant fog beyond the gazebo’s railings, but he must have felt Mary’s eyes on him, because his gaze flickered quickly over her face, then the bottle of pills, before darting away again. Then, carefully, his eyes once again met hers.
There was silence between them for a moment, until Jason said, a little too brittle to be blithe, “So! What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
It was such a corny line, said with just enough clumsy earnestness to sound sincere, that Mary couldn’t help but weakly chuckle. “Looking for my husband.” She gave Jason a warning look before he could say anything and added, “Haven’t found him yet.”
Jason’s eyes (strangely, it helped her to look him in the eyes – they were the part of him that looked the least like James) dropped again to her hands. “Is he in trouble with the missus?” The remark baffled Mary until she herself glanced down at her fingers, remembering the empty space where she used to wear her wedding ring.
“It’s…complicated,” she admitted, shifting slightly on the bench. “He disappeared after I got…sick.” She gestured with the pill bottle grasped in one hand, almost daring Jason to question her further – but he didn’t even spare it a glance, just kept his gaze calmly trained on her, and so after a moment Mary tucked the bottle away in its customary pocket, before folding her fingers together again in her lap. “That was three years ago.”
Jason let out a low whistle. “And you’ve been looking for him this whole time?”
Mary shook her head. “I was in the hospital. I didn’t know where to look.” That wasn’t the whole story, but they’d only just met, and the pain was still buried too deep to unearth so casually. “Then I got a letter. From him. Saying he was waiting for me. In our special place.”
“Here?”
“Yeah,” said Mary in a whisper, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear before reclasping her fingers, tightly. “At least…I thought so.” Dammit, she was not going to cry, she was not going to –
She didn’t notice that Jason had moved the cane away until he scooted closer, nudging her shoulder, black against pink. Leather brushed up on her calf, but almost as quickly shifted away again when she flinched. “Sorry,” Jason said, not sounding very sorry, “I was just – trying to help you feel better – anyway.” He cleared his throat and stared into the middle distance for a moment before looking back at Mary. “This was your only ‘special place?’”
Mary chewed her lip, thinking. “Mm, no. I don’t know. The whole town was our special place.”
“Hm. Special place for a special guy.” Jason snorted. “Well, I think he must be a special kind of idiot for leaving someone like you.” A beat while both he and Mary parsed this; then he added, “Er. No offense.”
“Maybe,” was all Mary would concede. After that, there didn’t seem to be much more to say, except… “May I have my cane?”
“Huh?” At Jason’s baffled look, she nodded to where the cane was propped on his other side. “Oh! Right.” He bowed his head with theatrical solemnity before presenting it to her with a small flourish. “At your service, milady.” Mary had to cover her mouth with one hand to hide the smile that was peeking through, despite her best efforts to stifle it.
With the cane back in her hand, Mary felt the world settle, just the tiniest bit. She had herself, her two feet, and a map. It wasn’t much, but she would, as always, make do. Taking a deep breath to steel herself, she tensed and relaxed her fingers on the cane grip once, twice, then slowly heaved herself to her feet. The needles in her legs started up their staccato dance again at once, but their poking and prodding was, at least, somewhat dulled for now. She was already halfway turning toward the walkway when, for the second time, a warm and steady hand landed on her shoulder.
“Woah, hey!” said Jason, drawing his hand away as Mary quickly whirled. “I just – where are you going?”
Right. She supposed he did probably deserve a little more than just a back turned silently from him. Even if he did look almost exactly like James. “Thank you for, ah, staying with me…” Mary’s lips worked silently for a moment.
“Jason,” he supplied, and there was something in his tone that made Mary blink – but his eyes, when she peered into them, were utterly unreadable.
“Jason,” she managed to force out. “But I need to find James.”
"You're going back out there?" At Mary's nod, Jason let out a rather aggravated huff and pinched the bridge of his nose exasperatedly, a gesture that for a moment made him look so familiar, so unlike himself, that it hurt Mary's heart. "You've got to be kidding. I mean, have you seen those – monsters?"
Mary nodded again, a little more vigorously. "I can handle myself. I've managed to this far."
"What about the red pyramid thing? Huh?" A strange gleam flared for an instant in his gaze, like lightning in a bottle, and then it was gone. A trick of the light, or a glimmer from the fog. Maybe.
"'Red pyramid thing'..." Mary repeated it uncertainly. "Um…no, what…?"
But Jason cut her off with a dismissive gesture. "Baby, trust me," he said flatly, "you don't want to know."
God, that pet name thing was really starting to get on her nerves. “My name,” she snapped, “is Mary. And I’m going.” With that, she turned her back to him and began to walk away; but she’d only gone a step or two before –
“Mary!” His voice was the same, exactly the same. Mary halted in her tracks, and eyed Jason warily as he came around to her side. He looked her over for a moment, then sighed and ran a hand through slicked-back, sandy-brown hair. “Look, just…let me come with you, at least? I know, I know,” he quickly continued, holding up a hand to forestall any interjection, “we just met, this is all moving so fast –”
“Oh, please be serious,” Mary muttered.
“I am!” he protested. “I am serious. If I let a beautiful woman like you just walk away and have God knows what happen, I’d feel terrible about it for the rest of my life.”
“I’m not beautiful,” said Mary, almost automatically. Jason only held her gaze, placid as lake water, until she glanced away, absently rubbing a blemish on her cheek with one thumb. She could feel the skin underneath flush, warm and tight. “Anyway, I…I don’t know if that would be…appropriate.” Christ, what are you, a schoolgirl? sneered some accusatory inner voice.
“What, you think your deadbeat husband is going to be jealous?” Jason’s tone was nearly casual, but there was something (frustration? disappointment? envy?) thrumming just underneath the surface. Mary shot him a glare that felt about as awful as it looked, shock and anger and heartbreak all rolled into one, and it made Jason wince. “Okay, you’re right, that was uncalled for.” They just looked at each other like that, as the fog rolled and the waves splashed, until finally one corner of Jason’s mouth twitched upward into a small, wry smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “You must really have loved him, huh?” he said, quietly.
“I…” (– leave me alone already – don’t come back –)
Jason tilted his head. “Didn’t you?” he asked, just as blandly curious (GET THE HELL OUT!) as if he were asking her about the weather.
This had to stop. “Alright, just…” Mary didn’t look at him as she waved a subdued hand vaguely. “Let’s just go already.”
She took another step and Jason was in front of her, leaning over to peer at her. “Yeah? So it’s okay?”
Mary gave a little shrug of her shoulders. “It’s okay.” Then her eyes flickered up, darkly gleaming. “But – you better not try anything…funny. I have a gun, you know.”
Jason flashed her a mock-fearful look, holding up both hands in surrender. “Oh, I’d never dream of it, darling. Scout’s honor.” Mary raised an eyebrow and he lowered his hands, suddenly appearing very fervid and intent. "Really. I'm going to keep you safe," he said, eyes smoldering like a storm about to break.
And, against her better judgment, Mary actually believed him.
