My only lead was a newspaper clipping.  One scrap of beaten up newspaper was all I had left of her.  One day, without any warning, I woke up to an empty bed and a note apologizing for, in her words, was something she absolutely needed to do.  Of course I called the police; that trail went cold one year in.  Then I found the newspaper, but any hope I had when I first spotted it once I read it.  All it had was a headline that said, “Underground Coal Fire”.  The rest of the headline had been ripped off.  What I really didn’t know, was what she was looking for.  Why did she leave?  My nights were sleepless, filled with that question, over and over.  Why did she leave?
As the sun broke the horizon that morning, I arose from my bed slowly, lethargically, and ambled into my bathroom so as to hastily brush my teeth.  The world seemed to be in a fog, as it did every morning, and all of my senses were dulled.  I paid no attention to anything I saw or heard, and my movements were rough and exasperated.  The newspaper in my hand blurred into a mass of splotched black and white, as I really didn’t have the energy to read, but when I instinctively turned the page, my eyes fell and focused on a headline that brought me to full attention.  It read, “Silent Hill Coal Fire Breaks Surface”.  Anytime I came across some location mentioned alongside coal fires, I looked up the name of the town, but none had been as close as this one.  At only being an hour’s drive away, I simply decided to go there and investigate, but it took me over an hour of aimless driving to finally ask for directions.  I stopped at a gas station on the side of the rode and went inside.
“Hi, I’m looking for a town called Silent Hill, do you think you could give me any pointers?”  I asked a woman at the register.
“Silent Hill?  Town’s closed.  Coal fire been burnin’ near thirty years.”
“Well how do you get to it?”  I repeated.
She sighed and said, “Just keep following the road outside.  The first turn you see, make a left.  Follow the signs from there.”
I thanked her and left, grateful to be away from the staring eyes of other customers.  I had felt the air go cold and their piercing eyes fall upon me when I mentioned Silent Hill, and hoped none of them thought me suspicious.  As I drove, following the woman’s directions, a fog began to creep in, settling in the valley as if the land had been raised to cloud level.  Eventually, I did see a sign, an old, dilapidated sign with peeling paint and loose boards.  It said, in faded and chipped letters: WELCOME TO SILENT HILL.  Soon after, I came upon what looked to be a visitor’s center, and I parked my car next to the building.  I got out, expecting to receive a chill, but instead the air felt pleasantly mild.  This surprised me, but quickly left my concious, as my next surprise made me stop cold.  I felt something light land on my head, and when I reached up to remove it, I saw my finger was stained with ash.  I looked up, and another piece fell upon my cheek.
“It’s raining ash?”  I said aloud, incredulous.
I gave my surroundings a more thorough scan; the actual town was eery, totally silent, and seemed to be in monochrome.  The ash that filled the air combined with the dilapidated state of the buildings and infrastructure made it feel like I was looking at a corpse, rather than any village.  I took a deep breath, steeled myself, and began walking into town.
My every footstep cracked on the pavement like gunshots, and echoed into the fog.  The air was totally still, and for the first time in a long time, I felt very much alone.  The diffuse light cast no shadows, there was no wind to shake the branches of trees, not even an ant crossed my path.  It was as if there was nothing here except for brick and concrete, an immortal monument to mankind, though warped by the passage of time to reveal the truth behind our success.  We come, we conquer, we die.
Lost in my thoughts, I at first did not hear the shuffling in the alley ahead to my right.  About ten feet away from the wall, I stopped dead, as it sounded like whatever was shuffling had kicked something on the ground.  Frozen, I decided to call out, hoping to find another soul in this labyrinth of mist.
“Hello?  Is anyone there?”
The shuffling continued, and there was no attempt at a response.
“Hello, do you need help?”  I called again.
I sidestepped my way to view into the alley, but as I opened my field of view to include the passageway, I saw whatever was making all this noise had pale, translucent skin, totally devoid of color.  Sheer curiosity kept me moving around the corner, as my heart began to race in my chest.  As my eyes landed upon the figure’s full visage, I almost retched in response.  It was standing in the alleyway, feet shuffling, with its back turned to me, twitching uncontrollably in the waist and head.  Its arms were… well it didn’t have any arms, instead it appeared to have had its arms wrapped around its chest and fused together underneath a membrane of the same, dead, gray flesh that covered its veiny body.  My heartbeat continued to increase, as it suddenly began moving to turn around.  As more details were revealed to me, the monster became even more grotesque.  First I noticed the monster’s lack of a face, or even any discerning facial features.  I then looked further down, and saw a hole in the center of its chest, oozing a bubbling black mixture, that smelled of bile and rot.  At this point, I did retch, and stumble backward into the center of the street, as it began shuffling towards me, making gurgling noises and spitting small jets of that weird liquid out of its chest.  As the drops hit the ground, they bubbled and popped, dissolving the concrete and emitting a small wisp of vapor.  I turned and began running, but as I reached the end of the block, more of those creatures emerged from the fog, all twitching violently, as if excited by my presence.  I turned left and continued running, not looking behind me, until I came upon a building with its front door open.  I ran inside to hide, and collapsed onto the floor after shutting the door.
As I caught my breath, I gave my new surroundings a good inspection, as I had no clue as to how many of these monsters were in this town, or whether they wandered into buildings or stayed outside.  I didn’t get a good look at the facade of this building, but the interior seemed to be some sort of apartment complex.  I went to the receptionist’s room, and began looking around for any kind of document that might tell me what was happening in this god-forsaken town.  On the desk, I saw a newspaper, and picked it up.  The paper crinkled in my hands, though it did not crack, but felt exceptionally dry and old.  After skimming through the pages for a few moments, I heard a crash come from another room in the building, followed by a blood-curdling scream.  I scanned my surroundings for a weapon, though all I found was a piece  of lead pipe, and moved to investigate.  I walked towards where I thought I heard the scream, and I was proven correct by another, equally piercing shriek.  These yells were coming from a bathroom at the end of the hall.  I slowly pushed open the door, and peered inside.

It was actually really dark in there.  It felt like the fog had migrated into the bathroom and turned black as night; I could hardly see my hands in front of my face.  I flicked the light switch, though I expected nothing, and indeed, nothing happened.  Then, a source of light flickered somewhere in the room, but it didn’t last long enough for me to pinpoint its location.  I waited another moment, and when it flickered again, I located it in the sink.  It was a flashlight, the military style ones that looked like an “L”.  It had a good weight to it; I figured it must've been from Vietnam or something.  I shook it, and that revived the bulb, filling the room with a dim, orange light, though that was miles above sitting there in the pitch black.  I walked up to the closest stall to the door, and opened it slowly.  Just a toilet.  The next one revealed nothing different.  The third and fourth would not open, so I peered underneath the stall, but again, found nothing.  I hesitated on the fifth door.  Trailing into the stall was a stain of something; it looked like blood that had been sitting there for a long time.  I pulled the latch, and slowly pushed the door open.  A flutter flew into my stomach when I saw a bloody hand sticking out of the toilet, missing its second and fourth finger, pointing straight up.  I looked to the ceiling, and saw, written in the same black blood as on the floor, the words: “ITS NOT SAFE TO PLAY AFTER DARK”.
Suddenly, the air was filled with the wail of an air raid siren, its long, cacophonous din filling and reverberating around the bathroom I was in.  I looked to the window, startled, and got on my tiptoes to see outside.  There, like a tsunami of night, a wall of blackness was encroaching on the building I was in, pulling up pieces of the road and buildings as it came.  Never in my life had I been so afraid of something, I froze, totally paralyzed by this incredible occurrence.  Perhaps I simply took the easy way out and accepted my death then and there, or perhaps the blackness was just too quick; it eclipsed my building and plunged the bathroom into total darkness once more.
Frantically, I shook my flashlight again, and again it stuttered back to life.  The siren was still completely deafeningly loud, and as I looked around the bathroom, I saw the tiles on the walls falling off and shattering on the ground in quick succession.  The porcelain of the toilets and the sinks cracked and broke, and the plumbing rusted away before my very eyes.  Paint fell off the ceiling in large clumps, and the wooden stalls decayed in a matter of moments.  Soon, I was in the middle of a totally dilapidated room, as if the darkness had swallowed up any amount of order present.  I whipped around in response to a noise, a bubbling noise, coming from the fifth stall.  Blood red tendrils began pouring out of the toilet, spreading as they contacted each surface.  These tendrils spread out like veins, covering the floor and walls and ceiling with a mass of writhing, fleshy growth.  I ran out of the bathroom, and almost bumped into the back of an enormous monster.  I first noticed its weapon, a giant sledgehammer which must have weighed fifteen or twenty pounds.  It was huge, built like an Olympic weightlifter, all muscle and fat, but it had that same, translucent-gray skin like the horrors I encountered outside.  It turned to face me, and its chest and right arm were covered in blood, blood that dripped off the end of the sledgehammer and down its legs.  Its face was the worst part; all of the holes in its head were stitched shut: mouth, nose, eyes, ears, everything.  It made a low rumbling noise as it dragged the sledgehammer behind it, then raised it above his head and after a moment more of shock, I put two and two together and got out of the way, sidestepping his mighty blow to the left, and felt the hammer crack into the floor behind me.  It then swept the hammer towards me, catching me in the back and sending me flying into the wall next to the front door.  I saw stars, and my ears rang in my head; totally dazed and almost unconscious from pain, I threw myself at the door and opened to a scene straight from hell.
Above, the sky was pitch black, but it was an unnatural blackness, a blackness that seemed to draw everything into it; it made you feel like letting go and floating up and up and up, never to come down again.  A flying creature passed overhead; it looked like a gargoyle with a horse head, all sinew and bone and skin, with a short, tapered tail and incredible talons.  A loud, deep bass note filled the air then, and rattled my brain inside my skull.  I turned to face the source of the noise, and fell to my knees as I saw the creature emitting it was a near twenty foot tall humanoid, totally black, except for two blood-red beads on its head, which I could only assume to be its eyes.
“This is hell.”  I said breathlessly, “I’ve entered hell.”