Chapter Text
The night was young, and Hob was not. Not in years at least. Most days his body was perfectly happy to still be the spry young man that he’d been when he received the gift of immortality. Then there were evenings like this…He had just finished grading his students’ final projects for the semester, and the crash had hit him rapidly.
He hadn’t INTENDED to fall asleep watching some Netflix show about ancient earthquakes on the couch with a bowl of popcorn at 7pm in the middle of the week…but here they were.
So when his phone—having slipped from the arm rest of the couch to be wedged between his shoulder and the cushion—began to vibrate with an incoming call, he came awake thinking that an earthquake was happening right below his very head.
With a jolt, Hob startled and swatted at the cushion, inadvertently smacking the phone to the floor. It hit with a clatter, and he winced at the sound, rolling onto his side and reaching for the phone on the floor.
“Fuck,” he moaned as he did so.
He slumped back into the couch with the phone in hand as the caller ID came up as a colleague from the literature department of the university. He frowned and checked the time. It was half past eight at night. Too late for a routine call. He sat up on the couch and answered the phone.
“Hello, Stephen?”
“Robbie, hey, so sorry for the oddly late call.” He sounded shaky.
Stephen always got a little twitchy this close to the end of the semester, but this wasn’t twitchy. He sounded genuinely unnerved. Something had happened.
“What’s wrong?” Hob asked, deciding to cut to the quick of it and try to avoid Stephen’s usual rambling around the main subject.
“Um…Christ, where to start—”
“At the beginning usually works best,” Hob said, standing up and already moving to put his shoes on. “Where are you? You need help?”
“Um…N-no, not me…I’m at the lecture hall now and…The medics have already arrived—”
“Medics?” Hob grabbed his jacket, keys, and wallet, doing a cursory glance around the flat before opening his front door. “On campus? Who’re the medics for, Stephen?”
“That…That Ric Madoc bloke…He just…Christ, you’ve got to see it to believe it.”
“I’m on my way now, mate. Be there in a jiffy.”
A jiffy turned out to be a cool ten minutes, plus another three when Stephen accidentally told him the wrong lecture hall. Not that it really mattered at that point; Hob could just follow the nervous crowd and staff trying to disperse them. It had been a few semesters since he’d worked in this building. For the past few years, Hob had popped off of the history and literature side of the university and had instead been teaching trade school classes: welding, plumbing, and the like. This semester had been carpentry…It had all awakened the old lives in him that had thrived on manual labor and the feeling of creating something with your own two hands. All the math and science, the sound of tools toiling and the ache in your muscles after a hard day’s work on a task. He felt a little out of place now, roaming these halls tonight after a few years away from this part of the campus.
He spotted Stephen, the head of the literature program at the school, talking to a police officer and a campus security officer. Stephen was a squat man in his fifties, bald on top and thinning the rest of the way around, looking every bit the dusty old librarian in his knitted sweater vest and pressed pants.
Hob hung back, making eye contact with Stephen so he’d know he was there, and then he left his colleague to wrap up…whatever statement he was giving to the officers. Instead, Hob meandered around the dissipating crowd, catching snippets of students’ and staff conversations but actively trying not to engage them. He wandered close enough to peer into the open doors of the cleared out lecture hall where whatever had happened…had happened.
It looked…like a lecture hall. No signs of chaos or disturbance at all. Just empty chairs and a stack of Madoc’s latest novel on the table behind the podium. Not exactly the sight he’d expected to see going by Stephen’s tone on the call and the voices of the students that he’d passed by.
“…had this crazy look in his eyes…”
“…just one after another after another, like some kind of psychotic episode…”
“…looked like drugs to me. Just a really bad trip. You know how those famous writers party…”
“…heard they found him in the stairwell babbling nonsense…”
“Robbie!” Stephen was hustling toward him soon enough, and Hob turned to look at him, spreading his hands in confusion.
“Bloody Hell, Stephen, what happened?”
Stephen wiped a handkerchief across his sweaty face, huffing a bit, and he gestured for Hob to follow him…away from listening ears.
“He’d finished his reading and was answering student questions,” Stephen explained once they were safely down the hall. “No odd behavior or strangeness at all for the entire lecture…and then he just…started talking absolute nonsense. All manner of…of half-formed ideas for stories.”
Hob frowned, perplexed as to why that was garnering such a response from everyone present. “Inspiration strikes at weird times, Stephen, you know that.”
Stephen eyed him, shaking his head. “No, this wasn’t that. It was like he was hallucinating it or…sputtering out the words like some kind of compulsion that he couldn’t stop. I was sitting in; I saw the whole thing. He was lucid as you and me, but he was scared by what was happening to him. I’ve never seen such a thing. Made what hair I have left stand on end!”
Hob held out a hand. “All right, all right, but that still doesn’t explain all the police and students—He’s gone to hospital by now, surely? So what’s everyone still doing hanging about?”
Stephen drew a deep, measured breath. “Rumors are already spreading. This way.”
He shuffled farther down the hall, and Hob followed him toward the stairwell.
“Two students found him in here,” Stephen explained, popping open the stairwell door.
Another police officer was standing on the landing inside, taking pictures of the walls.
“Said he was just collapsed on the stairs,” Stephen went on. “Mumbling to himself.”
Hob followed him, still not sure why he was being shown this…as if it was some kind of…crime…scene.
His thoughts trailed off as he looked up. The formerly plain painted walls were marred with words…written in the unhinged font of someone desperate to put ink to their thoughts. But the ink was red…and the ink wasn’t ink.
“Fucking Hell,” Hob breathed, stepping past Stephen to stare at the horrors scribed onto the walls.
“It’s blood,” Stephen said. “His own blood. Poor sod tore open his fingers and did all this…If I believed in it, I’d say he was possessed by something.”
“You said two students found him?” Hob asked, eyes tracing the jagged words without really reading them. “Did he say anything to them?”
Stephen sighed. “He…One of the last things he said that sounded coherent was…The student said he told her that he had someone locked in his house. To go let them out and tell them it was over or…something like that. Absolute nonsense.”
Hob continued to frown, staring at the scribblings on the wall.
He’d tried his hand at writing a handful of decades ago. It always ended up degenerating more into journaling, no matter how fantastical or otherworldly he tried to make the stories. He’d already filled enough journals to pack a small library. Written word was still one of mankind’s greatest achievements, and he’d fight anyone on that point.
Still, the way Dream’s face had lit up when he saw the shelves and shelves of journals in Hob’s flat…He hadn’t seemed to mind Hob’s disorganized, rambling writing technique. He’d practically devoured them in one sitting, during their now-monthly meetups.
It was an intrusive and wildly inappropriate memory to recall in this moment, but recall the memory Hob’s subconscious did anyway…To Dream standing in front of Hob’s bookshelves in his flat, refusing to sit or just being belligerent to the idea of getting comfortable at all as he stood there reading the old books. The barely-there smirk at the corner of Dream’s mouth as his eyes zipped back and forth across the pages, making dry, soft comments about some of Hob’s executions of plot-twists and backgrounds for characters and such. The nearly affectionate way he pointed out how Hob’s use of language slipped in and out of the time periods that he was writing in, using turns of phrase and words that were years, decades, centuries out of date.
All in good humor, almost close to appreciative, in the way that Dream seemed to revel in the concept of new ideas, of the creation of new tales and visions to…what had he told old Shaxberd…”to spur the minds of men.” He had commented, in a way under his breath that Hob didn’t think he was meant to overhear, that creating ideas for dreams and nightmares was such a second nature to him, was so inherent to his purpose and function, that he sometimes forgot how arduous it could be for humans to do so on their own.
Hob wondered what the old Prince of Stories would think about this madness.
The memory faded back to where it belonged, and the stairwell came back into focus.
Pause.
“Who was locked up at Madoc’s house?” Hob asked, looking at Stephen quickly.
Stephen blinked at him. “No one? Christ, Robbie, Madoc was an awkward sort, but he wasn’t some monster who would keep someone locked up like a hostage!”
“Did police go check?” Hob pressed, stepping out of the stairwell and having half a mind to start running down the hall toward the exit.
Stephen shuffled after him. “Yes. One of the students who found Madoc went to his house, and there was no one there. Apparently Madoc was wailing about it on his way into the ambulance, so yes, the police went to check too. There was no one there.”
Stephen was looking at Hob like he’d grown another head, and while part of Hob recognized that that reaction was warranted from Stephen’s point of view…from Hob’s point of view, he did not like the way these puzzle pieces were lining up.
From Hob’s point of view, there was a human who had had one successful novel followed by years of no ideas, and then said human inexplicably had a skyrocketing writing career over the past handful of years and whose works had a distinctly different style than his initial successful novel. Now the same human was suddenly crumbling into a supposedly random episode of madness: an overload of ideas so intense and debilitating that it could almost be construed as an attack.
The most straight forward answer here was something to do with mental health, but…something about it was making Hob’s brain itch.
In the year since Dream had come back into Hob’s life, and within said year as they met on a more or less monthly basis, Dream had not spoken much of what he’d been up to for the past 133 years. He’d simply said that he’d been…away, involuntarily, and fuck, if it hadn’t taken Hob long to read between those lines…in addition to moments during their subsequent meetings when Dream would just be…would just not…when Hob could tell that Something Had Happened to him.
Then too, the night had been young, but Hob had not been…and if there was one thing that Hob had learned after over 600 years was…well, was how to learn. How to research and dig and investigate things with very little information to start with and only a lot of grit to get answers. How to follow unsavory leads to even more unsavory places, to get his hands dirty in the pursuit.
Certain words had started recurring the more that he had dug. Words that Dream had never spoken of to him, and Hob had never brought up around him either. But that old brain itch had persisted to this day of it all. He wanted to know what had happened to his dear friend. How could he help him through the aftermath of it? And were there any perpetrators left alive that needed justice done to them for their role in it.
Occultists. Magic. Rituals. Capture. Binding Circle. Encephalitis Lethargica. Grimoire. The Angel of Death. A Devil in the Basement.
Burgess.
“Robbie?” Stephen asked, when Hob’s thoughts started to spiral. “You’re not going mad too, are you? Because I can’t take two in one night—”
Hob blinked, coming back to himself. His brain itched.
No, no, it couldn’t be Dream doing this to Madoc…Madoc couldn’t have captured Dream and held him for these years of career prosperity…Hob had been meeting Dream regularly for the past year. He hadn’t been locked away in some room and forced to give one human writing ideas. Unless the magic that Madoc used wasn’t physically binding but…magically binding? That Dream might be magically tethered to him like a dog but still…able to wander around freely—No, no, that didn’t make sense either. Dream would have told Hob or let him know that he was in trouble…right?
So why was that where his itchy brain kept taking him…if there wasn’t a connection?
Dream was the Prince of Stories…and some poor fucker had just been hauled off to hospital after descending into madness and writing endless ideas for stories in his own blood on a wall. It had a distinct flavor of what Hob imagined Dream’s kind of vengeance would look like.
“Seriously, is it something in the air?” Stephen scoffed, reaching out and wiggling Hob’s elbow.
Hob blinked again, taking in Stephen’s worried face. “Sorry,” he exhaled, shaking his head and putting his hands on his hips. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s just a lot to process.”
“You’re telling me!”
Hob looked at him, frowned, and then glanced around before back to Stephen. “No, YOU’RE the one who told ME about all this. Why me? I’m not teaching on this side of campus. Haven’t in a while actually.”
Stephen paused, winced, looked down toward the emptied lecture hall, and then back to Hob…almost guiltily.
“I don’t know…You were just the first person who came to my mind in a crisis. You put out more than your share of fires when you were over here. Old habit for me at this point, mate, sorry.”
Hob eyed him, then softened. “Aw, Stephen, I didn’t know you were so soft on me.”
Stephen’s face soured, and he palmed his forehead. “Fuck’s sake, I’m old enough to be your father. You kids are supposed to call on your elders for help, not the other way around.”
Hob snorted at that and tilted his head as he chewed the inside his cheek.
“Anyway,” Stephen waved a hand. “I said what I said. You made yourself quite the fixed point around here since you came on. Can’t blame an old fool like me for coming to rely on that. You’re like clockwork, Robbie. Every couple of semesters, here you pop up again like a daisy—”
Or an ancient Stranger, Hob thought with a wry smirk.
God, had his colleagues around here started to regard him the way he used to regard Dream over those centennial meetings? What an insult to the Dream King that must be.
Thinking of Dream again, Hob inwardly sighed to settle his nerves. Their next scheduled meetup was in a week. Hob would…see then for himself if his friend had any involvement or knowledge of this odd Madoc business. He’d have to wait until then anyway…It wasn’t like Dream carried a cellphone. And Hob had barely begun honing any kind of skill for retaining awareness and purpose in the Dreaming…not to even mention being able to maneuver his way into an unannounced audience with the King of Dreams himself in his own domain. That probably wouldn’t have been a good move even if he had been capable of it. No, he’d have to wait until next week to talk to him properly.
“You want to go get a drink?” Hob found himself offering.
Stephen shoved his hands into his pockets, puffing out his cheeks with an exhale. He grimaced again, glancing back toward the lecture hall, then back to Hob.
“God, yes. Where to?”
Hob smirked and gave him a wink. “I know a place.”