He clambered forward, pulling himself up onto the cool, polished stone, and knew that he was mad beyond salvation, or had died and was trapped in some terrible netherworld. He was beneath the earth in final darkness: there could be no voices, no phantoms. There would be no light making the steps gleam before him like moonlit alabaster.
He was running away from something, through a massive dark cavern filled with obsidian lights and sharp edges. Reflections and scattered light made it impossible for him to see where the walls were, and he ran into them over and over again, covering his exposed skin with painful cuts that oozed blood onto the floor. He caught glimpses of his pursuers: small, gray children, perhaps four years old, who appeared as washed-out, albino-like cave animals. Their eyes were sewn shut with thick cord, making him think of shoelaces. He heard no sound as they chased him. They did not communicate or look at him, but they always seemed to know where he was. Although he stayed ahead of them for the moment, he could not get away. He didn't go completely unhurt by their attacks; a couple of the monsters were able to slash at his legs with their blades and talons.
Even if he escaped, something else would get him eventually. He was alone in a hostile world—hostile universe. Whether he lived another ten minutes or ten days, he would probably never see another human being, would have only rasping, homicidal monstrosities like these for company until the inevitable end.
Countless shadows passed by, his path revealed by the light still gleaming from between his teeth, refracting off crimson windshields and broken glass, the carnage everywhere he looked. As he ran, he could swear he treaded on flesh and bone, a disgusting crack beneath his feet, his shoes slick with fluid and ichor... For the sake of his sanity, he didn’t dare think of it. A gore soaked wall rose before him - a dead end.
Turning, he shined the light upon the bestial creatures as they wrestled their way through the twisted metal, the fragments stripping flesh as they went¼ There was nowhere to run - nothing to defend himself with - his gun clicking on empty.
Finally they caught him. There were too many of them to fight off. Ten or twenty strong, they mobbed him and suddenly he was being carried through a secret passage. There was a table at the end, in a rough cruciform shape, made of matte-black metal with nylon straps. The children forced him onto it and strapped him down, immobilizing him. He felt a momentary sense of relief, thinking this is about as bad as it can get. Then they all looked at him, and he somehow knew they could see him through their sewn eyelids. They grinned, revealing mouths full of wickedly-sharp shark teeth.
They began to feed on him, swallowing huge chunks of flesh whole.
There is an atmosphere of unutterable loneliness that haunts any ruin—a feeling particularly evident in those places once given over to the lighter emotions. Wander over the littered grounds of an abandoned amusement park and feel the overwhelming presence of desolation. Flimsy booths with awnings tattered in the wind, rotting heaps of sun-bleached papier-mache. Crumbling timbers of a roller coaster thrust upward through the jungle of weeds and debris—like ribs of some titanic unburied skeleton. The wind blows colder here; the sun behind the fog seems even dimmer. Ghosts of laughter, lost strains of raucous music can almost be heard. Speak, and your voice sounds strangely loud—and yet curiously smothered. Or tour a neglected formal garden, with its termite-riddled arbors and gazebo. The lily pond is drained, choked with weeds and refuse. Only a few flowers or shrubs poke miserably through the rank undergrowth. Dense clots of weeds and vines overrun the paths and statuary. Here and there a shrub or rambling rose has grown into a wild, misshapen tangle. The flowers offer anemic blooms, where no hand gathers, no eye admires. No birds sing in that uncanny hush.
Such places are lairs of inconsolable gloom. After the brighter spirits have departed, shadows of despair and oppression assume their place. The area has been drained of its ability to support any further light emotion, and now, like weeds on eroded soil, only the darker sentiments can take root and flourish. These places are best left to the loneliness of their grief...
The ever-present mists and forbidding silence makes all endeavor seem shallow and pointless. The area is flooded by a silence as vast and deep as the ocean itself, a silence in which undercurrents of nervousness and suspense can effortlessly drown anyone in fear. The silence; like the hush of a gray morning after the season’s first snowfall, or the quiet, the long and dark quiet just after twilight, in the graveyard where the flowers in cracked vases are brittle and brown; the sound of the fog; the voice of a shadow; the protection of the draperies drawn over the locked window, muffling traffic and wind and footsteps on the pavement. The silence that whispers you’re alone. All alone. The sense of forbidding that hangs over this empty place is a more insidious enemy than anything composed of flesh and blood could ever be.
Even the frighteningly alien Perdition is preferable to this journey through the netherworld. If Hell were less than about fire than about futility, less about brimstone than about isolation, less about physical torture than about despair.
The City of Woe has many names. Niflheim, Zebul, The City of Nod, City of Forgotten Dreams, Silent Hill, the City at the End of the World, or simply Nightmare City. It is a mad metropolis that appears as a ghost town, as little signs of activity can be seen in the deserted streets or shattered windows of its forsaken structures, where the air itself seems lifeless, funereal. It is as though the town has died. Without power, people, machines, and vermin, the buildings have become tombstones, their foyers mausoleums and their basements crypts.