FIC (SPN): dark where the shadows run (Supernatural/Silent Hill crossover) Part Two

[obeetaybee]

Part One :: Part Two

*

Anne sat on the closed lid of the toilet wrapped in the warm towel, staring at the wall in the steam filled room. She ran her fingers absently over the bruises and scabs on the inside of her elbows, water dripping from the ends of her hair and down her naked skin. She picked up the old T-shirt from the floor and pulled the shirt over her head slowly, remembering.

Momma’s crying her name and light from Momma’s room spills over her Strawberry Shortcake bedcover. "Annie, come," Momma says as she pulls the still sleeping Billy into her arms. From the hallway come the sounds of furniture falling over. "…never supposed to find us… safe,” Momma mumbles over and over again.

Then they’re in Momma’s room and in the hidey-hole and Billy is crying and Momma says “hush, I’ll be back for you soon.”

But Momma doesn’t come back.

Hours later, Anne’s rubbing the back of her sleeping brother, his nose tucked against her neck. She’s crying silently because she heard the screams and thuds outside the closet door. She knows her Momma’s dead.

The smell of blood hits her as she opens the door to the secret hole hidden behind Momma’s closet. Her eyes find the first slash of scarlet thrown against the white walls. Her stomach heaves and her small hands begin to shake. They had come for her. For her and Billy. Like Momma was afraid they would.

Momma knew.

Her fingers hover over the stain, over the trails of blood pooling on the floor. There is something there, a hole in the middle of the blood and as she moves closer, it closes with a soft pop.

With a strangled cry, she pulls her hands away and ran back to her brother.

*

Questions heaped upon questions in her mind as Anne picked at the needle scab on her inner elbow. She looked down and watched as her blood welled up, crested and ran down her arm. On a whim, she swiped her index finger across it and gathered a fingertip full of crimson and dotted it against the wall. She put her finger into her mouth and sucked, the metallic taste of copper bursting on her tongue. Closing her eyes, she brushed her hair back from her face and braided it tightly. She shivered violently as water drizzled down her neck.

She opened her eyes and icicles struck her body like a million needles all at once. A small hole opened in the wall where she had rubbed the blood against the white paint. She reached for her jeans, pulled them on and buttoned them as she studied the small hole. She sat on the edge of the tub, as far away from the wall as she could get in the small room.

So, the hole in the wall in her mother’s bedroom closed while she watched. So what closed the hole? Was it the blood? It had to be, the hole here opened with hers. Was it a portal? Would it lead back to Silent Hill? Anne stared at the closed bathroom door, wondering if she could get it large enough for her to crawl through without the boys noticing. If she could get back to Silent Hill this way, she has no need for them anymore and they could leave. They would be safe.

How much blood would it take before it opened up enough for her to crawl through? How much time would she need before it was big enough?

Anne reached for her makeup bag and dug until she found the razor hidden in the bottom of the case.

*

Dean looked up from the cell phone in his hand when Anne walked out of the bathroom, fiddling with her shirt sleeves. He stood and flipped it shut as she stopped at the edge of the other bed and rooted through her bag. “What are these?” she asked as she pulled up the sheath of rolled paper.

“You drew those,” Dean said. Sam closed his laptop and looked over at her.

“I did?” She looked up at them, her brows raised in surprise, her fingers pushing the rubber band up the paper and into her hand.

Dean looked over at his brother and caught his eye. Sam’s jaw tightened and he said, “The nurses said you would draw after you were given your medicine. They said they’d never seen anything like it before.”

Anne looked from Sam to Dean. “I don’t understand.”

“They were doping you up on a cocktail of Chlorpromazine and Aripiprazole,” Sam said from the corner, standing up from the chair.

“Either one of them should have knocked you out cold. Instead, you entered an altered state or something and you would draw. That.” Dean motioned with his head at the drawings in her hands.

“I’ve seen these before,” Anne said as she tilted her head down to look at the angry scenes, her face visibly paling as she dropped each picture onto the coverlet. The blue, green and yellow colors of her bruise were vivid against her white skin. She bit her bottom lip “These buildings, these people. This is Silent Hill.” She stopped at one picture and sank onto the bed, the others sliding off the coverlet and onto the floor. Her hands were shaking so much the paper crinkled.

“I don’t understand,” Sam said as he bent and picked up the drawings. “You talked about a place called Silent Hill yesterday. Where’s Silent Hill? Is Silent Hill where they found you - the abandoned town? I thought you and Billy grew up in Ashfield.”

“What?” She asked, tearing her eyes from the picture. “We did. At least until…Silent Hill is the name of the town where my mother grew up.” She looked back down at the picture.

“It isn’t on any of the maps for the area,” Dean said, grimacing as he rubbed his palm over his forehead. “What are you looking at?”

She shook her head from side to side. “I can’t believe, this isn’t…”

“What?” Dean asked as he walked over and looked at the picture over her shoulder. “Holy fuck, Anne. Is this Billy?” He pulled the paper out of her hands. “What the hell is this thing holding Billy by his neck?”

“Give it back to me, Dean.” She stood and tried to grab it from his hands. He held it up over his head and deflected her punch to his chest. “Sit back down, Anne and tell us about Silent Hill.”

“Dean,” Sam said as he put his hand out for the picture. Dean handed it over to him and then looked down at Anne, her tightened fists.

“Anne, this is witch hunt stuff,” Sam said as he sat down beside her on the bed. He thumbed through them silently. “You’ve drawn all these figures being burned at the stake. There hasn’t been any witch burnings in the United States in hundreds of years.”

“There was one about thirty years ago. It was never made public knowledge.” Anne said as she looked over at Sam.

“Are you saying there was a witch burning in Silent Hill? And your mother - was she a part of it?” Sam asked, his voice rising.

“I don’t know,” Anne said as she stood up, shouldered past Dean to her pack, hefted it and walked to the door. “What I do know is I’d like to leave now,” she turned to look at Sam. "Are we ready? Can we go?"

Dean looked at Sam and tilted his head. His expression clearly read, 'let me handle this.'

"Um, a shower," Sam said quickly, and nodded at Dean.

“No!” Anne cried, her arms outstretched towards Sam.

Dean shook his head in anger. “Enough of this bullshit, Anne. Sam’s taking a shower and you’re going to sit here and tell me about what the hell happened to you in Silent Hill while he does.”

Sam handed the pictures back to Anne and she hugged them to her chest. "I’ll be real quick and then we'll be gone, okay?"

"Please?" Anne asked and sat back down on the edge of the bed, rubbing her hands over the back of the pictures against her chest as Sam gathered his stuff. Once the bathroom door shut, her booted foot tapped a staccato beat against the carpet. She put her thumb in her mouth and worried her fingernail as the muted sound of the shower started. The sleeve of her shirt slid down and the edge of the white bandage around her wrist showed.

"What’s that there?" Dean asked.

Anne looked up at him, her eyes unfocused for a moment. She blinked and dropped her hand into her lap and said, "What?"

Dean sat down beside her and took her hand into his. The pictures fell to the floor. "This," he said, trying to push her sleeve up to get a better look at the bandage.

She pulled her arm away and clasped it to her chest. "Nothing. It's nothing. The razor slipped in the shower and I nicked my wrist."

"Looks bigger than a nick."

Anne sighed. "It's not, Dean. It's just a nick. I put the bandage on it because I didn't feel like sitting there and waiting for the bleeding to stop."

Dean cleared his throat and tried another way. "Look, if you want Sam and me to help you find Billy, you’ll need to tell us the truth, okay?"

Anne closed her eyes beside him and as he watched, she straightened her spine and took a deep breath. "I don’t want you to help me find him, Dean," she said, her voice hoarse. "I need to do this on my own. I don't know..." she broke off, and pushed the palms of her hands against her eyes. Her sleeves slid down her arms, revealing both of her bandaged wrists.

Dean stood up, grabbed both her hands and pulled them to him. He turned her wrists, his eyes drawn to the large blood stains in the middle of the gauze. "What did you do, Anne?"

"Nothing!" she cried.

Dean shook her a bit. "This isn't nothing," he said as he pulled at the blood stained bandage, not caring if he hurt her or not. "Did you slit your wrists, Anne?"

Anne threw her head back, color rising in her cheeks. "It's not that! Dean, I swear! It isn't that," she tried to pull her wrists from his hands. “Let go of me, you ass!” She kicked at his legs with her feet. "It's the only way I know how to get back."

A crash and yell from the bathroom and both of them jumped in surprise. Anne used the opportunity to pull her wrists from Dean’s hands. “What the fuck! Dean! Dean, get in here!”

"What did you do?" Dean yelled at her again before he turned and threw open the bathroom door. Sam stood just inside, towel wrapped around his waist. He pointed at a large hole in the bathroom wall.

“Dean, look at that!”

"Where the fuck did that come from?"

Sam shook his head. "I don't know. I pulled the towel off the rack and there it was."

"I know who does," Dean said, furious now. He turned, expecting to find Anne in arms reach, and thinking about choking her if she was.

She wasn't. She stood at the door, pack on the floor beside her, her hands over her mouth, staring at the door.

The motel room door and windows were covered with heavy, rusted chains crisscrossing over their thresholds, held against the walls with heavy anchors and locked with gold padlocks.


Two quick strides brought Dean halfway across the room. "Now what the fuck is this?"

Anne shook her head, her eyes huge. “It's too soon. I looked away for one minute…this wasn't supposed to happen yet. You two were supposed to be gone by now. Why couldn't you have left when I wanted you to! I was supposed to be alone by now!" She turned to Dean and her eyes glittered with anger.

Dean clenched his jaw as he reached for the door and pulled on the padlock. It was blank, no combination, and no keyhole. He yanked at the chains on the wall, but they wouldn’t give. "Oh, fuck this," he snarled , picking up the sawed-off shotgun by the door.

Sam ran out of the bathroom clutching the wet towel at his hip and grabbed Anne's arm, jerking her with him down behind the bed. Dean brought the gun up, sighted and squeezed the trigger. The blast echoed through the room as plaster flew away from the wall. He pumped another round into the chamber, fired again.

When the smoke cleared, the chains remained, undamaged. "You have got to be kidding me!" Dean said and brought the gun up again. This time he sighted on the large plate-glass window. The end of the gun exploded with another loud boom. The glass shattered, but held. Three times Dean shot at the window until he rushed up to it and smashed the butt of the gun against the cracked glass.

It wouldn't break.

Finally, his arms dropped. "We're locked in," he said, and turned his head to look from Sam to Anne as they stood.

Sam dropped her arm. "The hole in the bathroom, it's a tunnel right?" She nodded her head. "You did it? How?"

Anne looked at Dean and then moved away from Sam. “I think it might be a portal of some kind.”

"Her wrists are bandaged," Dean said as he came up to her and pulled her arm out. “Says she nicked her wrists while shaving.” Ignoring her protests, he pushed up her shirt sleeve on her right arm and grabbed the blood stained bandage. He pulled the bandage away from her wrist and it fell to the floor as she cried out in pain. "Was it the blood, Anne? Blood magic – black magic?"

"Don't you dare judge me, Dean," she said, anger causing her to choke on her words. "My brother is trapped in Hell and I'm the only one who knows, the only one who can help him--"

"You're not the only one, Anne," Sam said. "How did you know about the blood? How did you know it would open a portal?"

Anne looked from Dean to Sam and then bent her head, staring at the floor. "I was seven when my mother was murdered. Billy was three. Somehow, I don’t know how, she knew they were coming,” Anne ran a hand across her hair. “Somehow she knew they found us.”

She sank down on the bed, her shoulders slumped forward, and her elbows rested on her knees. With a jerk, she pulled her pack off the floor so it landed with a thump beside her. Anne went through it as she spoke.

"My mother was born in Silent Hill and from everything I was able to learn, it’s a horrible, evil place. All throughout the history of the town, even before the place was settled in the late seventeen-hundreds, strange things happened. I’ve read it was a Native American holy place, I read it was a burial ground, and…I don’t know. All I know is all through out the history of that area there have been mysterious plagues, and lots of death,” Anne stopped searching and brought her hands up to her face. She covered her eyes for a moment before sliding her fingers down.

“I remember when I was a kid there was this word that would get stuck in my head for days. I would wander the house and the yard, mumbling it, hating it and it would disappear as mysteriously as it came. I couldn’t understand why, you see?” She sighed and it sounded like it hurt.

“Toluca. Toluca, Toluca, Toluca. And then when I got the letter and I started researching the area around Ashfield, I discovered it was real, there’s a body of water named Toluca Lake not far from Ashfield. It was a real place. And there were mentions of it in a lot of Bobby’s books.

“There have been numerous disappearances and records upon records of creature sightings, in that area surrounding Toluca Lake. Creatures not of this world. The earliest entries I could find in Bobby’s old books were from before the town was even named. A small village settled on the edge of the lake and there had been some kind of…of an incident. That's what the diaries, the church records, called it – an 'incident', as though they couldn't bring themselves to actually record what happened. But whatever it was, it made the villagers burn one of their own as a witch. From the diaries and journals and from everything I’ve read of her descendants, not only was she a witch, but she was an Arch Witch."

“So she was extremely powerful,” Sam said, clenching his jaw. “Only an Arch Witch could curse the ground on which she was burned.”

Pulling a heavy black leather-bound book from the depths of the bag, she threw it across the floor so it landed at Dean's feet. "That's my mother’s diary. I found it after--" she broke off. "It begins on my mother’s thirteenth birthday, and ends the day of the burning of nine year old Alessa Gillespie. Thirty years ago, they burned a child in Silent Hill."

Dean stared down at the black book, touched it with the toe of his boot before bending to pick it up.

"I started researching the town before Billy and I came east. Everything I was able to learn that wasn’t on the internet is in there. You’ll find a first person account of the night of Alessa’s burning. The bastards tied her to a chair and set her house on fire around her."

Dean put the shotgun down and opened the book. He looked up and caught Sam's eye and then shook his head. “Dude! Go get dressed!” Dean said as he sent it flying into his brother’s hands. Dean turned back to Anne as Sam walked by them to the bathroom, already flipping through the pages of the book.

"Anne," Dean said, hunching down in front of her. "What happened the last time you went to Silent Hill? What happened to Billy?"

"You'll think I'm insane," she said, staring down at the carpet.

Dean gently reached for her chin and pushed her head up. "You opened up a portal tunnel in the bathroom by using your blood. I think we're beyond the 'I think you're insane' part of our relationship."

She smiled faintly and then patted the bed beside her. When Dean sat down, she pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them and waited until Sam came back out of the bathroom before she began to speak.

"When that letter about my mother came, I wanted to leave right then. If it weren’t for Bobby, I probably would have. See, he talked me into staying and doing my research, so me and him, we sat in front of his books and dug up everything we could on Silent Hill. I knew I had to wait, I mean I had no intention of bringing Billy with me. You have to believe me on that. I didn’t want to put him into any kind of danger, so I was going to wait until he left for school before setting out."

Dean nodded and looked over at Sam, his eyes moving from side to side as he glanced through the journal. He knew Sam was listening.

"He found my research and refused to let me leave without him. What was I supposed to do? She was his mother, too. He called his college, told them of a death in the family. They gave him a two week deferment and even though Bobby begged us to wait a few more days so he could go with us, we got in the car and drove east.

“We didn’t talk much on the way to Ashfield, I filled him in on what I learned about the town and what I suspected happened to our mother, but that was it. When we got close to Ashfield, I don't know, he started acting odd."

"Odd, how?" asked Dean.

*

“When are we going to be there?” Billy asks from the passenger seat. This is the third nap he’s had in the past five hours and after every one, his mood has grown blacker. He fiddles with the buttons on the radio and until static screeches through the speakers.

“Hey. You wanna put your seatbelt back on?”

“I will in a minute,” Billy says, pushing the seek button on the radio again.

Anne closes her eyes briefly. “How about right now, Bill?”

“Fine. Look, see here? Belt, going across lap. Hear the click? Now I’m buckled up for safety. Happy now? How much longer do I have to sit in this stupid truck?”

Anne takes her eyes off the road and looks at her brother, his face awash in the blue glow of the dashboard clock. It's close to two am. “I don’t know, Bill. Another hour or two, maybe?”

He sighs beside her, and she can see him from the corner of her eye, running his hand through his dark hair. “Jesus, Anne, do you think you can drive any slower?”

Anne takes a deep breath, holds it for a moment and then lets it out slowly. Billy’s hand is reaching for the radio knob again and instinctively, she slaps it away. “Leave it alone, Bill.”

“Or what, Anne?” He asks. “Or what?”

“Knock it off,” Anne says and punches the radio knob with her index finger, the static cutting off. Silence fills the car, but it is anything but quiet. Billy’s tapping his fingers against his jeans with one hand and tapping his knuckles against the window with the other.

Anne tries to concentrate on the winding road ahead of her. Fog drifts in to lie across the road ahead. Perfect. Just freaking perfect. If Billy didn’t stop with that freaking tapping, she’s going to smack him upside the head. “What is wrong with you?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Bill snaps back as he punches his knuckles against the window. “I just want to fucking get there, Anne.”

“And I don’t?” Anne raises her voice. “You have a driver’s license too, you know. You’re more then welcome to take over the driving if you’re not happy with the way I’m doing it.”

“Shut up,” he says, and Anne’s so surprised, she quiet for a moment. Billy has never in her life told her to shut up before. Who the hell is this person sitting beside her pretending to be her brother?

She takes her eyes off the road again and stares at him. His eyes are tightly closed and his hands are clenched in fists against his knees. “Billy! What did you say to me?”

Billy’s eyes fly open as she glances over at him again. “Slow down, Anne! Slow down! You’re going to get us killed!”

Anne's eyes flash back to the road. It’s completely obscured in fog now. “What? Holy shit!” On reflex, her foot presses down on the accelerator instead of the brake.

There’s something in the road ahead. A person in the middle of the road. “Oh, fuck!”

“Anne!” Billy yells. He lurches across the cab of the SUV and grabs the steering wheel and twists it towards him. The fog lifts momentarily and the headlights illuminate a telephone pole directly in front of them.

She twists the wheel the other way and in a heartbeat, the world is spinning out of control as sound and glass and pain fill Anne’s head and then everything goes dark.

Gray light fills the car when Anne comes too. She’s hanging upside down, only her seat belt keeping her anchored to the seat. Hours must have passed. Her head hurts, her neck hurts, and her stomach hurts. But it’s forgotten when she glances over at the passenger side.

Billy’s gone.

*

"You went looking for him?"

"Of course I did. At first I was afraid he had been thrown from the wreck. I was so afraid I was going to find Billy lying broken by the side of the road, but he was no where to be found. I started walking. I walked down the center of the road through the fog until I came to a town. We crashed right outside of Silent Hill. I thought it was pretty fucking ironic at the time. That town," Anne shuddered. "That town is horrible. Everything about it is wrong. It's shrouded in a smoky haze, it constantly rains ash and it's deserted. At least, I thought it was deserted."

"What do you mean?"

"Things live there. I didn’t see any people,” she rested her chin on her knees. “I saw monsters."

”Monsters?” Dean asked.

Anne nodded. “I thought I had finally found Billy, I thought it was him. It had to be him. Who else could it have been?”

“It wasn’t?” Sam asked from above her.

Anne shook her head as a tear escapes her eyes. “I don’t know. I saw him for a moment– it was him, his hair, his jacket, the way he stands. He didn't look at me, didn't turn when I called him. And then he ran down this alley and I followed him, calling his name. He didn’t move. Then birds started shrieking and this shrill, deafening siren went off. Everything plunged into darkness. And that’s when they came.”

“Who?”

“The monsters. All the paint fell away from the walls, and I swear, it looked like they started dripping blood. I couldn’t see anything at first, it was so dark. Then there was this noise, this cricking, crackling noise. I ran and hid.” She bent her head so her cheek rested on the top of her knees.

“I was such a freaking coward. I peeked out from behind a dumpster and something was coming and I knew it was coming for me. And the bugs, there were bugs everywhere,” Anne shuddered. “They were as large as my hands and feet. I had to bite my hand keep from screaming. But…but the bugs weren’t the worst. The worst was this sound…this sound of metal grinding and heavy footsteps coming towards me. I was so scared.

“I mean, I know there are things out there. I know all about ghosts and demons and evil creatures, but this, I’d never seen anything like this before. It wasn’t human, and it wasn’t a demon. A nightmare, that’s what it was.

“It was ten feet tall and naked from the waist up. It dragged a huge sword. Its head was covered with this thing, this triangle shaped thing. I don’t even know how to explain it,” Anne’s hands fluttered up as her voice broke. She stared at the carpet in front of her, her eyes huge and unfocused. “The head piece, it looked like it was made of steel.”

Dean moved closer to her, instinctively offering comfort and she leaned into him.

“I should have done more. I should have made sure it wasn’t Billy before,” her breath caught in her throat. “Before I screamed his name. I didn’t know! I was so scared and I thought it was my brother! I was trying to warn him and but instead that thing found him, that thing picked up him up and tore off his head with his bare hands.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dean whispered as he put his arm around her shoulders. She gulped hard and spoke into his shirt.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she said, her voice hushed. “That thing threw the bloody head at me. It hit the dumpster and I ran. I ran blindly, I didn’t know where I was going and I couldn’t see. I must have tripped or ran into something, because I can’t remember anything after that until I was standing by a store front and it wasn't dark anymore. I recognized it – the store front - from the stories my mother used to tell of her parents. Her father owned a department store in Silent Hill and they lived above it. The door to the apartment was open – it looked as if it had been broken into. So I went in. That’s where I found the diary.”

“How did you get back out of the town?” Sam asked. He leaned forward in his chair, the diary set to one side.

Anne pulled away from Dean’s arm and stood. She walked to the shattered window and stared at the white fog hiding the world outside “I remember walking back out the way I came. The way I thought was towards my car. I remember the siren going off in the distance, and the darkness coming again. After that,” she turned and looked at the brothers, “I can’t remember anything until the rain woke me up. I was soaking wet, I must have lain there all night. But I couldn’t move until the rain stopped.

“I ran back into town, but it was different. It wasn’t like it had been before. There was no ash, no fog, there was no smell of smoke. I could see the lake at the end of the main street, the sun dappling on the surface like diamonds. I couldn’t see that before. The police found me when I was on my way back to the car.”

“Listen, Anne. That thing, whatever it was that monster picked up, it wasn’t your brother, okay?” Dean said, standing.

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’m not,” Dean looked at Sam before looking back down at her. “But I understand why you need to know.”

She shook her head and paced back and forth in front of the window, her hands tucked into her front jean pockets. “I hope you both believe I never wanted to get you involved with this. I thought I had enough time to get you into the car and out of this room before this happened,” she waved a hand towards the chains on the doors and windows.

“How did you know this was going to happen?” Sam asked.

“That?” Anne asked, pointing at the chains. “I had no idea those chains were going to lock us in here.

“While I was in the bathroom, I remembered what happened when I was a child, after my mother was murdered. There was a small hole like that one on the blood-covered wall and it closed as I watched it. And I thought…I thought maybe this was how they came for her, maybe if it closed up before my eyes it had been larger before. I mean, maybe it had been a tunnel, a portal whatever you want to call it. So I picked a scab and wiped my bloody finger against the wall. A few moments later, a small hole appeared,” she shrugged her shoulders and held up her hands. “I needed more blood to make a bigger hole.”

“Damn it, Anne, you should have told us. You could have killed yourself slitting your wrists.”

Anne smiled sadly. “It doesn’t matter how I die. I’m already damned.”

*

“It feels so weird to be here, talking so calmly about this with you with all this craziness going on.” Anne said.

“I know right,” Sam said as he looked back down at the black journal in his hands and then over Anne’s head at the chains on the door behind her. “No way out except for a large tunnel in the bathroom. You know, I went to quite a few parties in my first two years at Stanford that I wished had an escape hatch in the bathroom, but that’s not exactly what I had in mind.” He nodded his head towards the bathroom and grinned at her.

Despite how scared she was, she smiled back at him and looked over at Dean sitting on the edge of the bed.

“So tell me this again,” Sam said as he sat down across from her at the table. “Did the people of this Silent Hill town really burn that little girl?”

Anne nodded. “One of the first things Bobby did for us when we came to live with him was put together a family tree for me and Billy. He didn’t show it to me until after I received the letter. That stupid freaking letter. There is no Abigail Quincy and I think Bobby knew. One of the last things he said to me before we left was I was chasing a ghost.

“The Gillespies were descendents of the first witch burned, the Arch Witch Jenifer Carol. My mother was a Gillespie and Alessa was my mother’s cousin. Have you gotten to the part in my mother’s journal, about how quiet Alessa was as a baby? How she never cried?”

“Yeah, the mother thought because of the birth, it was some kind of a sign there was something wrong with the baby, right? Possible brain trauma or something?”

“From what I was able to pick up from reading the journal, Alessa’s father was never named and Dahlia considered her a virgin birth.”

“Fuck,” Sam said.

“Yeah. And then, it seemed as Alessa grew she began to show some characteristics of Jenifer. Telekinesis, reading people's thoughts. Other things. She was teased by her classmates and one afternoon, maybe Alessa had had enough. Alessa was the only one with the girl when she died. The Order believed Alessa was possessed. From what my mother wrote, the Order worshipped an archaic God. A God they believed resided inside of Alessa.”

“When did you have time to read all of this?” Dean asked.

Anne lifted her eyes to Dean’s. “Do you really think I was in a mad rush to go back out on the streets of Silent Hill? I sat on the floor of the apartment and read it.”

“Where did you find it?”

“Christ, Dean. I was in the apartment and something crashed in the building below me. I hid under the bed. I was scared. I thought I had just seen my brother murdered by a ten foot giant. I thought maybe I’d be safe there. The book was there. Any more questions?”

Dean shook his head.

“Do you think your mother and grandmother knew what this Dahlia had planned?” Sam asked.

Anne was quiet for almost a full minute before she answered. “I don’t know. It’s suspect, right? Either way my mother and grandmother were members of a cult. And my mother left town the night of Alessa’s burning. Half the town burned that night. I just don’t know, Sam,” she sighed and then gave a resigned shrug.

“This Order that you keep referring to, it’s the they and them you were talking about earlier, right? You think it was the Order that came for your mother?”

Anne nodded. “I think it was them. My grandmother died the night of the burning and my mother never spoke of it to me. But I’d like to believe my mother was the one who notified the police about what the Order was up to. I don’t know whatever happened to the surviving members, but the official cause of the fire was never released to the public, only that Alessa was badly burned in the blaze.”


Part Three