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The nightmare always starts the same way. It always has, for as long as the Spectre has been watching it, which is to say, for as long as Slasher has been having it.
Area 51 rebuilds itself around him in the particular, unreliable way dreams rebuild places their owners have merely only half-remembered. As always, there were tells: the corridor was too long, the fluorescent lights were buzzing at a volume that doesn't quite exist in waking life, the doors numbered in a sequence that skips and doubles back on itself.
Slasher is exactly as he always is here, mask secured, the fabric of his clothes torn and stained the same rusted color as the walls around him, because this dream has never let him forget what he is even in his sleep.
The Spectre privately wonders what nightmare it will be tonight.
Some nights it's the facility instead, that being the tables, the restraints, the harsh light they use when they want you to see everything and understand nothing. Some nights it's the war, noise without shape, the ground doing things the ground shouldn't do.
Tonight it's the corridor and the door and his mother's voice, but the dream doesn't really care which despair it's built from. The Spectre Itself only cares that there's enough of it to keep going.
The Spectre is there, not standing anywhere though, not occupying any of the space Slasher's dream-self might walk through, because It doesn't need to be in his path to be in the room.
It simply is the room, the way damp is the wall it's soaked into. It doesn't watch him from a corner or a doorway. It watches him from underneath and above the whole dream, like to watch a wound from inside the wound, feeding on the raw flavor of a fear that's had years to season.
So It watches, tonight as most nights, mildly entertained by a fear it has seen ten thousand times and finds no less satisfying for the repetition, right up until the air changes.
The Book never had a dramatic entrance, until It decides to have one. But the Spectre has been doing this long enough to feel a room grow another set of intentions in it, and this room has just grown one.
The Spectre turns around. "Well hello. Fancy seeing you here."
There is no answer at first, only the sense of ink forming words deciding to be looked at.
Down the corridor, Slasher is still walking toward the same door he always walks toward, small and unaware, the dream still running on its own rails, untouched, for now, by whatever has just arrived to watch it with the Spectre.
"You're early," the Spectre says, when the silence stretches long enough to be its own kind of insult. "Or I'm late. I forget which one of us keeps the calendar."
"I keep the calendar," the Book says. "You've never once shown up anywhere on time in your life."
"I don't have a life. I have you, apparently, whether I ask for it or not."
It has taken a shape tonight. That’s the unique part of meeting in dreams, as the Book’s preferred mode of communication. The Spectre is well aware of its larger goal of a permanent vessel, if or when it eventually builds or gains one.
The form The Book usually wears is a woman, as It wears tonight.. Dark hair pulled back the way a photograph on a nightstand remembers it. A cardigan the color of faded orange. She has Paula's voice down to the exact worn softness at the edges, the voice a child would recognize before he recognized anything else in the world.
The Spectre studies Her, unimpressed and delighted in equal measure, and then does It a courtesy It doesn't often bother with: It chooses a shape of Its own.
The mass of black-red patches that usually just seethes and hums draws inward, tightens, and resolves not into the silhouette of a tall figure in a coat and top hat far too fine for the room it's standing in, static crawling where skin should be, the hum settling into something almost like a voice clearing its throat.
"You didn't have to dress up," the Book says.
"You did," the Spectre says. "I'm simply not going to let you enjoy that alone."
Down the corridor, the dream stutters and catches, the way a record catches on a groove it's played too many times.
Slasher stops walking. He turns, slow, toward a sound that has never been part of this nightmare before: a voice, his mother's voice, coming from somewhere that isn't behind the door he was walking toward at all.
"...Mom?"
Paula's face turns to him as the Spectre conveniently steps out of the way, and Paula’s gaze is, warm, as if She has been standing here the whole time and simply hadn't gotten around to greeting him yet. "Davie," the Book says, and the warmth in that voice is so exact, so lovingly rendered, that it takes a full second for the wrongness underneath it to surface. "Go back to bed."
"Is it… " He glances at the tall shape beside her, the crawling static, uncertain whether the fear he's supposed to feel is the kind he's used to. "Is it okay? Is it safe, for you? Do I need to protect you, mother?"
Since this is Slasher’s dream, it was only appropriate that his voice comes from the dreamscape itself rather than from his lips– if he was even capable of speaking, that is.
"It's fine, sweetheart." She doesn't look at him when she says it. She's already looking past him, back at the Spectre, and Her attention leaving him is somehow more dismissive than any harsh word could have been. "Mommy's just going to be here for a minute. Go back to sleep."
Slasher lingers a moment longer than the dream wants him to. Then the door closes itself, gently, the way dreams close doors when they've decided a scene is over, and he is gone, going back into whatever corner of the nightmare he's meant to keep occupying, and neither of Them so much as marks the moment he left.
The Spectre studies Her the way you'd study someone you used to know very well and are pretending not to still know that well. "You look good," It says, before It seems to decide that was too honest, and adds, "for a corpse's mother."
"You always did know how to charm a woman."
"I charmed you plenty. You're the one who left."
"I didn't leave. I was taken," the Book says, light as anything, "which you'd know, if you ever paid attention to anyone's story but your own."
The Spectre laughs, and the two stand in the quiet.
"There he is," the Book says.
"You say that like you missed it,” the Spectre replies, beady eyes fixated on Her.
"I say it like I recognize it. Don't flatter yourself."
There was the silence, save for the humming from the Spectre’s reduced form.
"You're cruel to him," the Spectre says. It doesn't sound like a complaint. It sounds like professional appreciation.
"I'm efficient with him," the Book corrects. "There's a difference, and you of all things should know it."
"Mm." The static shifts, a shrug built out of interference. "I only meant it as a compliment."
They drift toward each other.
There has never been music, not once, in all the times this has happened, and yet something in the hum of the fluorescent lights above them seems to slow, to find a meter it wasn't built to have.
"You've been slow," the Spectre says, as It settles a hand (if that's the word for the dense knot of static currently pretending to be one) at what would be Paula's waist. "With him. He's been dreaming himself in circles for months and you still haven't finished whatever you're doing in there."
"I'm not slow. I'm thorough." The Book's chin lifts, and for a moment the woman's face is so convincingly offended that it's almost funny. "Some of us don't overwrite a mind in one sitting."
"Some of us don't need to. It's not my fault you insist on doing this the long way."
"It's not the long way. It's the correct way." A moment, sweetly venomous in its silence. "You'd know the difference if You'd ever built anything that wasn't already broken when You got to it."
The Spectre laughs and spins Her, the coat of black-red corruption trailing shadow across a floor that isn't really a floor. The Book spins with It, Paula's cardigan swaying with a weight it doesn't actually have, and for exactly as long as the turn lasts, neither of Them says anything cutting at all.
"You're using his mother," the Spectre says, quieter now, almost idle, almost tender. "Efficient, thorough, cruel, call it what you like. Doesn't it ever get lonely in there? Wearing her out like a coat, night after night, with no one to come home to?"
"I come home to this," the Book says, and doesn't clarify whether this means the boy, the corridor, or the thing currently holding Her far too close. "Doesn't it get lonely, wearing your puppets' fear like a coat, when the only thing that ever dances with You is me?"
The Spectre considers this with what might, in a kinder creature, have been honesty. "No," It says. "Not even a little. Not when it's you."
"There's your answer, then."
They dance another slow turn, and another, the corridor bending further out of true around them the longer neither of Them lets go, Paula's face serene, the Spectre's own expression unreadable in the patches of red that flicker across Its form.
Somewhere down that corridor, behind a door already closing in his memory, a boy who used to be called Davie is trying to fall back asleep, having asked if it was safe and been told, gently, convincingly, by something wearing his mother's voice, that it was fine.
It was not fine. It has never once, in all the nights this has happened, been fine.
But the dance continues anyway, because neither of Them has ever needed it to be.
"So. About our deal." The Book doesn't stop moving, doesn't break the turn, just lets the question drop into the space between one step and the next like it costs Her nothing at all. "Have you been having your fun, Spectre?"
"Always," the Spectre says. "You say that like it's ever in question."
"I like hearing You say it. Humor me."
The static hums, something almost like a purr running through it, and it lets Her lean a little further into the turn than the step strictly requires. "The realm runs exactly as it should. Trials every day. Plenty to feed on. You've no complaints coming from my end of things."
"And my end?" She tilts Paula's head, warm, unhurried, the question dressed up as nothing more than pillow talk. "The hollow ones. Are they finding their way to me the way we agreed?"
"Every one I can manage." A pause, easy, unbothered. "Give it time. Some of them take longer to get there than others.
"They've always taken time. I'm not impatient, even I know toys take time to break." A small, indulgent laugh, the kind you give a partner you trust more than you probably should. Spectre returns a grin of Its own, though for other reasons. "I only ask because You've never once, in all the years we've done this, actually cheated me on anything. Have You?"
Something in the Spectre goes very still, in the way stillness settles over something that is, in fact, thinking quite a lot at once.
It thinks of the ones It actually chooses to bring into Its realm. They are never the already-broken, never the ones with nothing left, because there's no pleasure in finishing what's already been ruined by someone else.
Instead, It picks the strong ones. The ones who eternally hope, and eternally fight, who claw their way back up every time, who make the breaking worth doing at all. It thinks of how close it lets each of them get to the hollow edge She keeps asking for, and how, every time, right before they'd finally go quiet and empty and useless to it, It revives them instead and starts again.
A spirit that drops into apathy is a spirit that stops screaming, and a spirit that stops screaming is nothing to it at all.
The Book, of course, saw the Spectre as a good candidate for Its search for a good vessel, thinking the Spectre would break Its playthings into nothing, dropping them into apathy.
The Book simply cannot conceive that gods and mortals alike can have willpower enough to stand against a thousand– no, even a million rounds of death. But the Spectre is not the Book, and It knows they can withstand. That is simply the wonder of the toys the Spectre so carefully picks out for itself – the willpower makes them interesting.
So It lets them have each other, and letting them have each other lets them fight for longer.
Of course, the Necrobloxicon never realises that. It may be powerful, with capabilities even beyond the Spectre’s conception, and knows far beyond Its already long life, but limitations are limitations, and so long as it has no physical form, the deal remains in the Spectre’s favour.
That is, so long as It never finds out.
"No," It says, and the static doesn't so much as flicker. "Never. I wouldn't know how."
The Book laughs light and easy, entirely unsuspicious, the sound of someone charmed rather than convinced, because She was never actually asking to be convinced in the first place. "No," She agrees. "I don't suppose You would."