Chapter Text
Robert Gadlen had many names. Robbie, Rob, Robin, occasionally Reuben. In one memorable life he was Hobart. His truest name was the one his parents had called him when he was a child in the early 1300s: Hob Gadling. Almost no one knew that name these days, so he was quite surprised when two women he had never seen before sat down at his table at the New Inn, and called him by his true name.
One of the women could only be described as "average": lank brown hair, curvy figure, vaguely pretty in a nondescript way. Yet there was something unsettling about her. Her eyes. They were blue, cloudy sky blue, with an odd marble calm. When she looked at Hob it felt like she was looking not at him but through him. Hob had felt that sort of penetrating gaze before, but the one who had looked at him so had stormed off in 1889.
The other woman, if she was a woman, for it was hard to tell her age, was distinctly odd. Short and scrawny, she had one blue eye and one green, and messy blonde hair punctuated with streaks of blue and green and pink. She was wearing some sort of mesh bodysuit that didn't cover much, though thankfully the bodysuit was covered by a huge denim jacket that fell almost to her knees. She draped herself into the seat perpendicular to Hob, resting her multicoloured head on the table.
The nondescript woman sat across from him, and she said "Are you Hob Gadling?"
Hob set down his pen, exams forgotten. "Who's asking?" One could never be too careful. As a friend had warned him centuries ago, Hob, though immortal, could still be hurt or captured.
"You know our brother?" The woman spoke slowly, like she was waking from a long nap and still trying to figure out how words worked. Like it took so much energy to form sentences. She had spoken eight words to him but those eight words were heavy with exhaustion. The girl with the colourful hair hummed a long "mmmmmmm" sound, rocking her forehead on the wooden tabletop.
"Brother?" Hob asked. He tried to think who he knew who could possibly be related to these two, and drew a blank.
"Garden maze," offered the scrawny girl. "Poetry? No." She slid bonelessly to the floor and curled into a tight ball. Hob glanced worriedly around the pub. The girl really did not seem right in the head. "Ummm, fish bowls are cold," she informed Hob. "Poor fishy."
"Dream," the brunette said. She drew out the word with lugubrious effort: Dreeeeaaammm.
The girl on the floor sprawled flat on her stomach, her cheek pressed to the sticky floorboards. "Do you ever want to talk to time but you keep losing track of the seconds? You must be very good at counting, Mr. Glad Man. I forget sometimes."
Hob felt like he was missing something crucial. "Maybe I know him by a different name?" he suggested. Who on earth named their child Dream? "What does he look like?"
The brunette hunched into her seat. "Usually he has black hair. Pale. Tall."
The colourful girl giggled. "Scary!" She reached out and tugged the hem of Hob's trouser leg. "He's almost in our houses. Sad Devil."
The descriptions, such as they were, sounded awfully familiar. Hob suddenly recollected 1989, the sinking feeling of knowing his friend wasn't coming. "Does he dress in black? Always wears a ruby?" Please not him. Let his friend be safe and well.
The brunette nodded wearily. She fiddled with something on her left hand: a ring with a cruel-looking hook sticking out of it, which she turned so that the hook was pointed toward her palm.
Hob blurted, "His name is Dream?!"
The woman smiled, and in the same instant she lifted her hand and plunged the sharp end of the hook ring into the palm of her right hand, twisting it hard.
"Fuck! " Hob yelped. Several patrons at the bar looked over. The woman stared at him, expression dull as blood streamed from her palm. The girl on the floor poked Hob's ankle. If this was his Stranger's family, small wonder the Stranger was so secretive and moody.
Hob took a deep breath. "Okay. Okay." He had lived through many terrible things. He had dealt with far worse than two clearly insane immortal beings. "What about… your brother? Is Dream alright?"
The girl crawled to the bleeding woman and rested her head on the woman's lap, while the woman grinned, working the hook deeper into her hand. "Noooo," the woman drawled, apparently savouring the fact that Dream wasn't well. She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, leaning toward Hob as if sharing a delicious secret. "He's been trapped for a hundred years. No food, no light, no hope."
"A hundred years," Hob echoed, dubious. "If he's been trapped for a hundred years, why are you just telling me now?"
She wrenched the hook from her palm and stroked the girl's hair with her bleeding hand. "We told you. He's in our realms too often. Despair. Delirium."
Wow, that sounded terrible and it clarified nothing. Hob was more lost than before. "I'm sorry, I don't – "
"Bring him chocolate!" The girl crowed from under the table. "He doesn't like the ones that make love and melt together."
Hob focused on the brunette. "I don't understand. So Dream is trapped. How can I help?"
The address Despair gave him led to a crumbling Gothic manor: Fawney Rig. Hob had done some of his own research, and the local legends concerning the estate and the Burgess family were the stuff of occult legend. Some said Roderick Burgess, AKA "The Magus", had imprisoned the Devil in his basement. Others said it was Death he had ensnared, and for his hubris he had been violently murdered. One superstition held that ravens guarded the estate, and to see a Fawney Rig raven was an omen of death. There were ghosts, of course. Curses of nightmares and madness. A tale of a woman who had been raped by the Devil, and she had fled in the night, taking her Antichrist infant with her.
This morning the house was swathed in light fog which swam lazily around the overgrown shrubs and trees. The elegant front door was heavily bolted, the bolts reinforced by thick planks nailed across the entrance. Graffiti scrawled over the boards gave a pretty good idea what the locals thought of Roderick Burgess:
THE MAGUS BURNS IN HELL
Underneath, a more elegant hand had added: Omnia vincam. Both proclamations were bordered with crude pentacles, some of them freshly painted. Hob shouldered his bag of tools and readied his canister of self-defence spray. Such a storied place might attract all manner of dangerous people, and Hob had come alone. Not his smartest idea, but he didn't fully trust the word of someone named Delirium. If Dream was here, Hob needed to see it for himself.
As he circled the house he was disappointed to see that all of the windows were boarded up with good-quality wood. Further graffiti warnings and doggerel decorated the boards. One ordered him to KEEP OUT! Death lives here! Another declared The Magus is dead! Long live the Magus!
Curiously he saw no vagrants. A houseless person who'd set up shop here would know the best way to get into the basement, but the grim house had apparently scared off even the most desperate vagrants. There were few windows to the basement, and the windows that Hob did see were both boarded up and too narrow to admit a person. All the main doors had been thoroughly blockaded.
Around the back he had a stroke of luck. Some kind of shed stuck out from the house, choked with weeds and a rusted wheelbarrow. Perpendicular to the shed was a plain door, which looked to have been boarded up with less care. If Hob remembered the nineteenth century correctly, it was a servants' entrance, likely for allowing staff easy passage between the servants' hall and the supply shed. Some quick work with a hammer and a prybar freed the boards, though the hinges were rusty and the wood warped so that Hob could only open the door partway and had to squeeze through in a very undignified manner. Inside, the corridors were claustrophobically narrow and the predominate décor element was dark wood panelling, which made the stuffy rooms and hallways feel even smaller.
The natural light from the open doorway fell away quickly. Hob was forced to navigate via torch light. Roderick's son Alex had abandoned the manor in 1960, and now Hob's torch beam revealed sixty-two years worth of decay: decrepit furnishings, blankets of grey dust, copious rodent droppings, clouds of spiderwebs. If Dream was here he had been trapped in stale darkness for over half a century. No food, no light, Dream's sister had said. Hob added to the list: No fresh air. No voices. No touch. No companionship. Hob shuddered. For his Stranger's sake he hoped the sisters had been misinformed.
He moved cautiously through the maze of rooms, looking for any indication of the basement. There didn't seem to be any logical layout to the ground floor, and several times he started down a corridor or entered a room only to realise he'd already been there. He found a lot of storage closets and pantries, many filled with antique items that would sell for a high price, if Hob was so inclined. He found a staircase going up into darkness. He found a hidden closet that held a terrifying effigy of a human figure hung from the ceiling by its ankles. While hurrying away from that horror, he tripped over what appeared to be a discarded fur muff but turned out to be a mummified fox. He sorely regretted coming alone to this mausoleum of perpetual night, this rotting monument to death. Only the possibility that Dream was here kept him from fleeing. He would never forgive himself if he ran from this place, only to find out he had left his friend in torment.
It was dumb luck that he found the door. An ironing board and a dress form had been piled in front of it. Not really expecting anything helpful he kicked the items aside and inspected the door. It was locked, which was odd for what had probably been a sewing room, but the wood was weak and his prybar splintered through it with ease. The torch light illuminated descending stairs squeezed between walls that were maybe shoulder-width apart. Hob tested his weight on the first step. It felt solid enough but the last thing he wanted was to fall through the stairs and get himself stuck underneath the house. What a fine mess that would be: him and Dream both trapped in the hellish gloom, unable to find each other, without hope of rescue.
The passage was short, but even the minute it took to reach the bottom was too long. The darkness here was somehow more complete than it had been upstairs, the still air was frigid, and the sprawling house above was a malevolent weight that threatened suffocation. Hob's boots scraped against a thick stone floor. He had passed weeks inside dungeons less oppressive than this.
The basement was long and high-ceilinged. He turned his torch toward the left wall and swung it clockwise in a slow arc as he shuffled forward. He wished the beam was stronger and that he knew what exactly he was looking for. Maybe some hanging chains, a metal door –
Or a giant fucking glass sphere suspended from the ceiling. Hob gaped.
A figure was curled on its side on the bottom of the sphere. A skeleton. Hob inched forward. His heart was racing as he pointed the torch toward the naked figure, and what he saw stole his breath away. Thin, paper-white skin stretched between swollen joints, grotesquely emaciated. Deep hollows between the ribs and underneath elegant cheekbones. Sunken wells of eye sockets. Limp black hair, desiccated lips. Closed eyes.
Hob's knees buckled. He folded to the ground, the torch light mercifully drooping away from the tortured figure of his Stranger. This morning's breakfast was threatening to make a reappearance. He rested his forehead against the icy flagstones, closed his eyes. Breathed.
Act. He needed to act. Do something, anything. His sense of logic rebelled at the idea that Dream was still alive. Nothing could survive in such a condition. Even Hob would have begged for death before he reached that stage of suffering.
His light snagged on curved lines painted onto the floor: the binding circle Despair had told him about. The invisible impenetrable wall that barred magic and magical beings, rendering Dream's siblings helpless to reach him. The circle may have blocked Dream and Delirium and any number of spells and enchantments, but Hob was only a man. He rubbed at the lines with his jacket sleeve and found that he had been mistaken. The circle wasn't painted on the floor at all. Whatever substance formed the lines and sigils smudged easily beneath his sleeve. The thing that had kept Dream trapped could have been scraped away with the scuff of a boot. If only anyone had tried…
The smudged sigils blurred into an unreadable swirl as Hob's eyes flooded with tears. His lungs burned with dust as he choked on a sob. So much suffering, and for what? Riches? The Burgesses had already been incredibly wealthy. Fame? Money could buy that. Immortality? Hob had gotten that by chance, by being stupid and drunk on a day when two powerful entities happened to be in the same tavern.
Maybe it was too late for Dream, but the circle was broken. Dead, Dream was unbound, and Hob would not leave his friend in the lonely dark. He could do that much. He sat back on his heels and scrubbed at his face with trembling hands. He could weep later. For now he had to figure out how to open the sphere, and to do that he would once again have to see Dream's skeletal body. He took another shaky breath, gathered his courage, raised his eyes to the glass – and gasped, falling backwards onto the floor in shock.
Light glinted from the hollows of Dream's eyes. In his fall Hob's torch light swung wildly, no longer brightening Dream's gaunt face, but the pinpricks of light in Dream's eyes remained. They followed Hob as he scrambled up and pressed his hand to the curved glass.
Dream was alive.