At midnight, at a gas station in a small town in Maine, USA, a young man in brown overalls and a white hat on his head was staring at a western movie playing on a TV screen with great interest, holding a stack of uncounted dollars. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

"them!" The bearded youth roared, and at the same time waved his fist, casting his gaze to the eerie darkness outside the window, and the double-barreled shotgun leaning against the door.

It's midnight, and even in this cozy town, a lonely gas station on the outskirts of the city may be robbed, so it's normal to have guns ready. And......

Remembering the strange rumors circulating in town, the man named Anderson, who whistled to hide his nervousness, still clenched his fists slightly.

The town where he lives, called Silent-Hill, is a quiet and peaceful town with a leisurely pace of life and beautiful scenery. Every year, many tourists come here to escape the summer and spend a relaxing holiday here.

As with other tourist destinations, there are some weird rumors about this town that resemble urban legends.

The problem, though, is that the eerie story of Silent Hill ...... It seems like a little too much compared to other places.

Perhaps due to the climate, the town is often shrouded in heavy fog, and it is said that in the early part of the last century, a cruise ship carrying dozens of people disappeared into the fog while sailing on Lake Toluca, north of Silent Hills. At that time, the police and the army organized a large-scale search and rescue operation, but the boat was never found.

In addition, Silent Hill was the scene of horrific massacres during the American Civil War, when the prisoners of war of the Southern Army were held in the underground prison under the current history museum, waiting for their own death - the local prisoners of war had no option of "survival" at all, only the right to choose how to die. And the executioner who killed them, in order not to be recognized, wore some kind of large triangular helmet.

Perhaps because of these past events, even today, there are many terrifying legends circulating in this town:

It is said that at midnight, a large man wearing a giant pointed helmet and holding a butcher's knife was seen walking through the streets, bleeding everywhere he went, looking like a bloody torture ground.

-- On occasional foggy days, some residents have seen strange figures, twisting and twisting in the fog, and their movements are not at all like what a human can do. But when they went up to check, they couldn't find anything.

If these rumors are unfounded, the increasing number of disappearances in the town is even more frightening: nearly 50 people have gone missing in Silent Hill this year alone. Of course, some of these gamblers may be intent on escaping debt, but others ......

Remembering his best friend who hadn't been seen since May, Anderson frowned slightly. I looked up at the round clock hanging on the wall of the room.

"Don't worry, I'm leaving soon." He muttered to himself.

It's late November, and as soon as he's done this year and gets his salary, he'll quit his job, leave the town with a bit of a bad mood, and start a new life in a nearby city.

Although he doesn't have much money at hand, as long as he finds a job similar to a gas station, he won't be reduced to the level of becoming a homeless man. Although his current job is not bad, Anderson does not want to stay in this town at all.

He could sense that something strange was happening in the town. Although he didn't know what was going on, a voice deep down warned him that it wasn't something humans could do.

Gotta get out of the ......

Stuffing the wad of dollars into the cash register, Anderson took off his hat and put it on the table, turned off the lights in the gas station room, and hung a "closed" sign on the door. Then he stood in front of the transparent glass door and began to check that the door was locked.

Since there was no business at night in the place, the gas station would close after midnight, but there would still be an employee to keep watchman, and Anderson would be the one to do that today.

Locked the tempered glass door from the inside, Anderson thought about it, still picked up the shotgun next to the door and carried it on his shoulder, hummed a little song that was not in tune at all, opened a small door and walked into the small monitoring room, intending to see the situation of the surveillance camera.

"There's a power outage?"

Looking at the pitch-black screen, Anderson was stunned for a moment, then noticed the time and camera number displayed in the upper left corner of the screen.

"Hell ......"

He remembers the last time he came in to check, the camera was still working. Less than half an hour later, things were very different.

――Did someone break the camera?

As soon as he thought of going out for inspection, he had to leave this closed "safe house" alone and go outside, and the young man who seemed to be tall and big still felt a little worried in his heart, and the little song he hummed in his mouth suddenly stopped.

Walking silently to the freshly locked main entrance, Anderson stood in front of the glass door, gazing intently at the gas station yard by the light outside that had not been extinguished.

He saw a man.

“……”

Realizing that something was wrong, Anderson clenched the barrel of the gun in his hand slightly, did not move or make a sound, just quietly watched the figure.

The guy was standing behind the farthest tanker, and because his upper body was covered by the shadow from behind, Anderson couldn't see the other party's appearance, and he couldn't judge the person's height, he could only see that the guy was wearing a pair of crumpled gray wool pants, and there seemed to be no shoes on his feet, revealing toes that were not quite the color of a living person.

"Damn."

Anderson didn't know what that guy was, and he didn't want to know at all. Just as he took out his mobile phone and hid behind the counter, and was about to call 911 to call the police, a sound came from the front, causing his right hand to shake, and the phone fell on the cold floor with a snapping sound.

"Hahahaha......"

He heard a shrill laugh coming in from the direction of the courtyard.

It wasn't some ceremonial laughter, it wasn't crazy laughter, but some kind of rhythmic laughter, like invisible claws scratching at the heart, and Anderson couldn't help but chill his body.

"Damn, what the hell......"

Bursting with a foul mouth to suppress the foreboding in his chest, Anderson slowly looked up to make sure that no one was staring at him above the bar, and then stretched out his trembling right hand to pick up the mobile phone on the ground, and pressed the first digit of the alarm number "9".

"Hurry, hurry, hurry!"

I tried hard to dial the police number in the United States, and it usually takes less than a second to enter the number, but now it is difficult to get through. Under the shrill laughter, Anderson's fingers seemed to freeze, and he couldn't even move.

Just when he finally pressed two numbers, and was about to press the last "1"-

"Hahaha......"

Laughter erupted from the other direction, this time not in the courtyard, but from inside the house.

"Ahh

Anderson screamed, subconsciously threw away the phone, the LCD screen fell to the ground and cracked directly, and the light on the screen disappeared suddenly.

The laughter, which would have been very joyful if heard on a funny TV show, was like a pale ghost hand choking Anderson's throat on this lonely night.

Reaching for the shotgun, he lifted the heavy firearm to his chest, aiming in the direction of the laughter. Anderson stood up with trembling legs and slowly walked to the monitoring room.

What is hidden in that tiny room?

What is it that makes such a laugh that is neither human nor ghostly, nor does it look like an electronic synthesized sound?

Consciousness was occupied by confusion and fear, and Anderson clutched the cold barrel of his shotgun, his palms already oozing cold sweat.

Faced with a strange situation that has never appeared before, this seemingly "tall and mighty" man has given up the opportunity to continue thinking, but has begun to anesthetize himself with lies:

This is not true.

It's just an auditory hallucination.

There was no sound.

It simply doesn't exist.

Looking at the dark monitoring room without turning on the lights, Anderson, who was standing five meters away, stood in place with his feet as if he had taken root, unable to take a single step.

――You can't go in.

A voice said to him.

The contents of that room are not for mortals to bear, if they see......

But if he didn't go in and find out, the damn laughter still kept coming out, as if mocking his cowardice, making him irritable at the same time with fear:

"Hahaha......"

"Hahaha......"

"Stop laughing!"

The bearded young man, holding his head and wailing, finally lost his mind completely, raised his shotgun and shot at the door of the monitoring room!

Bang!

The smell of gunpowder spread through the air, and a wisp of white smoke rose in front of Anderson.

Although shooting in the gas station could cause an explosion, he didn't care so much at this time, opened the barrel and took out the hot cartridge case, took out the plastic shell bullet from his pocket and stuffed it into the barrel, and fired another shot into the monitoring room.

This time, the laughter in the room finally stopped.

"Kill you bastard......"

Anderson, who kept scolding in order to strengthen his courage, replaced the shotgun in his hand with two new bullets, and finally strode into the monitoring room with the "courage" he had accumulated for himself with the gunfire just now. And then......

The next morning, when the other colleagues came to change shifts, they were surprised to find Anderson lying in the glass door, his mouth open and his tongue sticking out and laughing, but two blood marks slowly flowed from his empty eye sockets.

The young man was completely insane.

It wasn't until he was taken away by the police that the other employees of the gas station finally walked into the messy room in horror and found two eyeballs connected to nerves on the floor of the surveillance room with bullet holes in the walls.

No one knows what happened that night except Anderson, who had gone mad.

Whether his eyes were gouged out by himself or by someone else, no one knows.

……

"From my previous experience, 'Paradise' has two effects on people." Zhang Luo, who was standing in front of the workbench, said in a deep voice: "Missing, or crazy." ”

"According to the information sent by the undercover agents we have planted in the Monster Management Bureau, there have been more and more unexplained disappearances around the world recently." The energy body agrees through a speaker on the crafting table.

"It's not a bad thing to go crazy." Frankenstein remains succinct: "Silent Hill is especially severe. ”

"After all, that place is the 'home' of the Lord of Paradise." Zhang Luo nodded.

He knew that the monster he was currently tracking had first appeared during a ritual that had taken place in Silent Hill. If it weren't for the cultists in that town trying to summon a god known as the "Red God", the Lord of Paradise would not have appeared.

For a long time, though, the Lord of Paradise's sphere of influence was limited to that town. But since the monster was summoned to its rented house two years ago, its power has grown and grown, and it is now capable of reaching a global scale.

To fight against this unclear and elusive guy is, in some ways, even more difficult than a duel with a corrosive star. As the saying goes, "open guns are easy to dodge, but hidden arrows are difficult to defend", in the face of an enemy who didn't know what to hide in that corner, even Zhang Luo was a little helpless.

However, if we say that the emergence of the "inner world" is actually the materialization of people's nightmares and subconscious. An "old man" who knows a lot about nightmares and the subconscious may know something.

Thinking of this, Zhang Luo turned his head to look at a recliner next to him, and said, "I'm going to find 'foreign aid', please take care of my body during this time." ”

"Who?" The energy body and Frankenstein asked at the same time.

"Of course it's Freud, no one knows the subconscious and dreams better than that old man." Zhang Luo smiled: "Moreover, it is very likely that the Lord of Paradise has some kind of connection with him. ”

Recalling his fight with Freud in the "Nightmare Theater", Zhang Luo leaned back on the recliner and asked Frankenstein, who was still standing aside, "Are there any anesthetics or something?" I want to sleep faster. ”

Hearing this, the girl in white stepped forward quickly, and a slender metal needle suddenly stretched out from the fingertips of her right hand and aimed it at Zhang Luo's arm.

"Stay safe." Frankenstein said.

"Don't worry, you won't die anyway if you play in your dreams." Zhang Luo said with a smile.

"I think you're setting up a flag." The energy body complained.

"Whatever."

Before Zhang Luo finished speaking, he felt a sharp stabbing pain in his right arm, followed by a feeling of weakness and tiredness.

Frankenstein's medication was immediate, and less than five seconds later, he passed out. (To be continued.) )