FicWad

She closed the door behind her, softly, so as to not allow the handle to hit against the jam. She wanted no noise, even though she wasn't even sure if she was wakeful - reality these days seemed between a rock and a hard place, unrelentless.

She didn't notice that her art room, the one sacred place to her, had changed in appearance - roughened down, slothful, grating. A theme of rust and mold carried along the walls, unknown pipes suddenly hung from the ceiling, and the floor almost.../squished/ under her foot. But she noticed none of this.

Leaving one hand on the knob, one hand on the door itself, she breathed in and out for a moment, seeking solace in what she knew she had to do. Burn the paintings. It was the only way out. Burn them, send them back to the hell they had come from. There was nothing else to be done. She slowly released the door, finding she could stand without it's support. Then she heard the footsteps. Her grey eyes went wide, one clenched fist going to her pounding heart as if it would stop it from ripping it's way out of her chest.

"No..."

She closed her eyes, willing the sound away, but it drew closer. He was walking towards her, slowly, a controlled pace ment to cause the prey fear, to freeze it in place until the killing strike. She waited for the hand to descend on her shoulder, the familiar feeling, waiting for the feel of his breath on the back of her neck, but it never came. The footsteps had stopped. Behind her?

She whipped around to find...an empty room. As empty as she had left it, the easel holding her latest nightmarish piece, covered by a dark cloth so she didn't find her eyes roaming over it for hours on end. She stood frozen in place, thinking for a moment. /Hearing things, I'm hearing things/. Like she had been for the past month. Hearing things, seeing things, /feeling/...

Walking towards the easel, she didn't lift the wrapping from the canvas. Better I never lay eyes on it again. Because, I think if I do... She would never destroy it if she looked at it again. She found the canister of gasoline she had 'borrowed' from the downstairs utility closet in her apartment building. Taking in a deep breath, she stepped forward to douse the cloth in the flammable liquid and start the process.

"Romy?"

She stopped at the sound of that voice. No one called her by that name anymore; she wouldn't let them. No one could call her by that, because...

"Romy?"

She set the canister down, choking back a scream of frustration. She'd heard his footsteps, seen flashes of him turning corners, felt his hand...

"Walter? Walter, where are you? Why are you haunting me?" She turned and there he was. The same way she'd last seen him, before moving to Ashfield, in those dirty pants, the blue jacket, unkempt blonde hair...smiling that same damn smile. His hands fell limp at his sides, covered up to the wrist by his jacket sleeve. Something about him seemed childlike, while at the same time something was...off. Off in a bad way, in a very, very bad way.

She didn't move, and neither did he. It was predator watching prey, and Romy wasn't sure who was who. She still wasn't even sure she was awake.

"How did you...how did you get into my apartment?" She watching him, a thin strand of brown hair falling into her face. Blinking, she tucked it back behind one ear and she could've sworn that in that one moment of time when she'd had her eyes closed, he'd moved a foot closer. She tried to remember to breathe, struggling to keep her hands at her sides instead of holding them up as if to ward him off. He opened his mouth again, a small show of teeth and the dark cavity leading inward, looking as if blood might suddenly come flowing out of it. Then he closed it, as though the words had been snatched from his mouth by some unseen spirit.

"Walter? What's going on? Why are you here?" She was getting more frustrated, more frightened. She had no idea what was going on - she had to burn the paintings, then all of this would stop, but nothing would stop as long as she stood there questioning someone who had been dead for over twenty years. She took a hesitant step towards him and his image shuddered like a projection on a television screen. Another step, and it became firmer, quality became sharper, and with each step that drew her nearer he became more...real. She stopped when she was a foot away - one more step would take her right next to him. She looked up at him - it was him and he must be alive. He'd been trying to reach her, it was so obvious now, he had been alive all these years and now he'd finally found her! It was so...

"Romy?" His handsome voice was a broken record, yet the only saving grace about his abominable appearance. She remembered when he used to keep himself so well, clean and upright. Up until he'd started the murders. That nickname, from years past, haunted her. She never let anyone call her by it, because if they did it brought back all of those horrible memories.

Because it was for his use only, and he was dead. Dead.

He's dead, if he's dead, then how is he here? Oh my God, what is going on?! She almost stepped back, but a sudden grip found itself around her right bicep, holding her in a death grip so she couldn't even wriggle her way out of it. Turning terror-stricken eyes back to his face, she noticed the smile seemed...more demonic, more horrific. But it hadn't even changed. He pulled her closer, five inches away, and with his other free hand he put a blade to her throat, a slick piece of metal that was so cold, deathly cold, the serrated edges dying to bite into her pale flesh. His face was inches away, the blade willing to imprint a smile of it's own onto her throat, and her heart had ceased beating for fear of drawing breath into her lungs. The room around them pulsed as if in life - the pipes became intestines, the floor was the gooey inward walls of a stomach, the walls breathed through pores big enough for fingers...And all Romy had eyes for was Walter. Walter, dead twenty years, after killing himself. In prison. After killing ten people.

You're dead. DEAD. You killed all those people, and then you killed yourself! She screamed at him mentally, screamed at herself to stop thinking that he was alive. But something in her recognized him, those old feelings stirring up even after twenty years - it was those damned clippings. Someone had sent them to her - the killings had started again. Ten more people - random, but just like how he had killed the others. Scarred numbers decorated their dead flesh, numbering from twelve to the more recent 20 and 21. Those people...just a few blocks away...but I'm not a part of this!

"YOU'RE DEAD!" She finally screamed, only to have the effect of opening his eyes a fraction wider, those cold cobalt eyes, widening in surprise and then sinking back down into quiet pleasure. Pleasure of the kill. He released her arm, as if to say go ahead, run. I can find you, whenever, whereever. You'll never escape. Never. She stood, stock still, in place, the knife still against her throat, a thin line of blood already drawn against the parchment-white skin. Instead of turning away, she pressed closer, lightly placing hands on his dirty-jacketed chest, one she remembered touching. The skin against her skin. The blonde hair tangling in her own in cotton sheets in her apartment in Silent Hill.

Silent Hill.

The knife pressed harder, but still she went forward, on tip-toe, reaching for his mouth with her own. She reached it, and found his...

A dead corpse, rotting on a cross, flies, the smell, decay, winged feathers stuck to the cross in a blasphemous version of wings of holy angels, the mouth twisted in a scream, the feet bare, scratched on them numbers, a corpse a dead corpse a dead corpse A CORPSE A DEAD DECAY CORPSE ROTTING ON A CROSS WINGED FEATHERS STUCK A CORPSE ROTTING ROTTING ON A CROSS A BLASPHEMOUS VERSION OF THE CRUCIFIXT-

The noise, the white noise rang in her ears, the sound a television makes when the screen loses the picture. But it was a scream a scream so high in frequency that it popped ear drums, killed sound and ended everything. She pulled back, the cut in her throat a smiling grin of blood and an open wind pipe, her scream a high frequency that couldn't be heard by humans, falling to the floor, the cold sticky floor, gooey with the stomach acid to break down anything in it's way, the walls breathing faster as she lost so much blood, her blood, her heart overworking itself, the pipes - no, intestines - jerking about in the wall as they emptied themselves of any and all waste, soaking through her jeans, emptying out her mouth with the blood, no empyting through the gash in her throat, the noise, THE NOISE....


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*

"Rosie! Rose, I'm home!" Charlie Epson let himself into apartment 312 of the Blue Lilly Apartments Complex, in Ashfield. He had an arm-full of groceries, simple stuff. He didn't want to leave Rosemary alone for long because of her sudden relapse into depression. He called out again, worried, but then reassured himself that she was just sleeping. That, or she'd gone back into her art room, and he knew how she got when it came to her painting. She could get wrapped up for hours, not even wearing headphones or anything. Just concentrating. He set the groceries in the small kitchen and made his way to the bedroom to see if his girlfriend was fast asleep in their bed. She wasn't.

That left only one place. The art room.

Charlie knew better than to disturb Rosemary at her work, but while she was on five different medications for one ailment, he was too concerned to leave her alone for long. He knocked on the door, but there was no reply. Not as if I expected one/, he muttered to himself, as he cracked the door open slowly. He looked over to the open window, furrowing his brow - /that was closed when I left, she always likes it closed so the light doesn't fade the colors - , eyes wandering down to the red stain on the floor - spilled paint? - and finally over to the corner, behind the door, where Rosemary's dead body lay. His brown eyes went wide in terror as he fell to his knees and scooped up her dead body. In one hand lay a serrated kitchen knife, sticky still with her blood. Her throat was open wide, grinning at him in a brigand's grin, cut so close to the bone that he wondered how long she had been able to stay concious to do that. Sobbing, he stroked her hair carefully, tenatively as though she would break even more than she already had.

He felt blood on her back, and tenatively he sat her up after he was sure there were not cuts on the rest of her body.

Carved into her back were numbers. Five numbers. It made no sense to him, but he clasped her body, her cold dead body, close to his and sobbed into her blood-stained brown hair as her head flopped back and forth because it could barely hang on to it's neck. A vision of a rotting corpse on a cross passed through his vision, along with those numbers, and he hadn't even noticed that Rosemary's...Romy's...dead face was...

Smiling.

Those numbers ran through his head again, along with the sound of her voice, her precious voice.

00121.