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After the escape from the asylum, he never thought he'd have a normal dream again.
He closes his eyes, the scent of bodies he had long since gotten away from clogging his senses and the grimy feel of dried blood on his skin, layered over with warmer and wetter of the same. The echoes of the insane words he had heard in his time there still echo in his head.
Lisa left him.
He'd told her to.
She and the boys weren't safe with him anymore, so he'd cut the thread in hopes of one day picking it back up again. With Murkoff breathing down his neck for his betrayal, it just wasn't safe for them to have any contact with him, any sort of anything with him. They're going to read the newspapers, look for his name, and he's arranged to meet her in five years if he's still alive by then.
But his dreams...
His dreams are the sort that almost convince him he has gone insane, the imagery in them utterly terrifying.
The cannibal, Frank Manera, chases him down corridors, sometimes melding with other aspects of the asylum to create a dream that he wakes from in a cold sweat, the sound of his hacksaw ringing in his ears. The memory of the sound of his teeth closing on human flesh as he ripped it straight from a corpse he had then proclaimed love of, to be in love with...
Waylon shuddered, his arm thrown above his head, pressed into the thin motel pillow.
He picks up jobs here and there, occasionally serving as some sort of piece in a plot to bring down Murkoff even further, putting his computer know-how to good use to work his way through what little back doors exist in their programming. It pays well when it pays, and it brings him a sense of relief to see them fail even more.
The way they had treated some of the people there, in that awful place...Some of them had just been there for therapy, a week-long visit that turned into a nightmare.
One such person had been Chris Walker.
He'd found the man's picture not too long after, a small bio and a plea for his return. His sister had been looking for him, trying to locate the ex-military officer after having heard about the fires and the destruction of the hospital. He'd contacted her once, trying to figure out more of the story, and he'd been sent a prompt reply.
Her name was Susannah, and she was six years younger than her brother.
Christopher Walker had been checked into the asylum for little more than a week when she'd gotten a letter supposedly from him that said he was going to stay for longer. He'd checked himself in, she'd seen him off and worried over him the entire time, and then the letter was the last thing she had ever heard of him.
Mount Massive had been the only place that took his insurance from his time in service, and when he'd been brought home with a head full of nightmares and a severe case of PTSD and anxiety, he'd gotten her to help him find a place to go.
(If he remembered correctly, she'd run to help him when he'd had an episode one night. The next day, Chris had asked her to help him find somewhere else to be.)
Waylon grumbled tiredly, flipping himself over in the bed. He could sympathize with the man now, away from where he had met him once. When they had met, he'd been so scared that he could have pissed himself, but now he could only feel pity for the man. It seemed like he'd just been another victim of Murkoff, launched face-first into insanity.
Sitting up in bed, Waylon rubbed at his face, pulling his glasses off the nightstand before wandering towards the bathroom.
A hand took his wrist as he flipped on the light, another resting on his hip.
"Darling..."
He whipped around, eyes wild as they searched the room behind him.
That was the other thing.
An hours-long encounter with a man named Eddie Gluskin, AKA 'The Groom' as he was known to the inmates, and he kept having hallucinations that the man was still there with him. His nightmares were full of him, blood-soaked and dripping with it as he screamed obscenities at Waylon.
He shivered, seeing nothing in the motel room but the shape of his bed and his bags.
Sometimes, when he slept, he'd dream of the man having succeeded with his table saw and removal-of-certain-parts, except that he'd somehow survived the insane procedure. Forced to wear a dress, becoming nothing more than a part of the asylum and it's lunatics.
To become Gluskin's Bride.
That had been another discovery in his life that he might not have wanted to find. Edward 'Eddie' Gluskin was a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of both his father and his uncle, and somehow that had made so much of what he'd said in the darkness of his lair make sense. Waylon didn't want it to make sense, and he had nearly thrown his laptop across the room when he'd come face to face with a picture of a teenage Eddie.
He'd turned nineteen and murdered both men in cold blood. The police had found him curled up in a corner of the room, hunched over the bloodied and severed penises of both of them.
They'd found him...
His hair, in the photos of his youth, was long, pulled back into a ponytail. It seemed that what had been done to him had been taken into his mind and warped, the forced feminization of his victims an echo of what his father had done.
Waylon swallowed as he looked in the mirror, running cautious fingers over the dark bags under his eyes. He could almost understand the man, and that was what terrified him.
He didn't want to understand.
He didn't want to be anywhere near understanding of the man that had chased him so much, the one that had sent a message of fear and pants-wetting horror to every part of him. He still walked with a limp from when he had jumped down an elevator shaft to get away from him, he had a cane propped against the wall next to the bed for when he had to walk long distances.
Eddie Gluskin had ruined his life.
And Murkoff had made him worse. Mount Massive Asylum had made him worse. He remembered now, knew why Eddie had called him familiar, and wished he could turn back the hands of time and rescue the man before they could shove him into the Morphogenic Engine bullshit.
He had seemed almost...Clear-minded when he'd rushed the barrier to try and get help. Afraid and unwilling, but clear-minded, his eyes meeting Waylon's as they'd dragged him back to his destruction. Rationally, Waylon knew that if he'd tried to help, they both would have ended up in trouble, possibly even more than they had found themselves in, but he sort of wished he had tried.
In another life, that was the sort of man he might have gotten along with.
Possibly.
A look into his history had told him that Eddie seemed to be genuinely interested in crafts, specifically sewing, knitting, and crochet. He'd been in a middle school debate club, featured in his hometown newspaper. A smile that was eerily familiar had reflected in his glasses, a small boy with dark hair and bright eyes holding up a sign that stated who the group of children were. It was almost heartbreaking to see the difference between the boy he had been and the man he had become.
Waylon shivered, hands clenched tightly on the sink's porcelain, trying to ignore the photograph of the Canadian wilderness hanging on the wall above the toilet.
A knock on the door had him cursing quietly, limping his way towards it and grabbing the small gun he had been given by Lisa as a parting gift, opening it slowly with himself behind it. There was nobody there when it was open far enough for him to look to both sides, and he felt a prickle of worry settle in at the base of his spine.
On the stoop was a box without any labels or writing on it.
He looked at it for a moment, nudging it gently with his bare foot before dragging it inside and setting it on the nightstand. Clicking on the small lamp, he opened it slowly, revealing a camcorder with a broken lens and several dents in the body of it.
It looked like it had gone through nearly as much as him, and he almost smiled at that thought.
Flipping it over, he hit the button to turn it on, surprised when it actually turned on. The small screen allowed for the image of a man with short, dark hair to show up. "This is Miles Upshur," he stated, voice tinny in the darkness of the motel room. "And I'm going to reveal what's happening in Mount Massive Asylum to the entire world."
Waylon pressed a hand to his mouth, feeling as if he were going to throw up everything he had eaten in the past week.
The reporter he had sent an email to, offering an expose on the asylum and the horrors within. He had just about forgotten that he'd drawn someone else into the madness of Murkoff.
Letting the video play, Waylon curled up on the bed, knees tucked to his chest.
He missed Lisa.
He missed his boys.
Most of all, he missed who he had been before.