Chapter Text
The darkness broke, eventually.
Hob moved, and then stopped moving, because it hurt like hell. Memories came back slowly. He’d gone out with some of the other teachers to celebrate the end of the school year. He’d gotten pleasantly, though not incredibly, drunk. He’d walked home afterwards. Or, he’d been walking home, and then it had all gone dark.
He’d woken up chained to a table, a terrible pain in his head, and strange black tubes coming out of his arms. He’d expected—interrogation. Questions. To be called a witch, or get demands about his immortality.
He hadn’t. He’d just gotten pain, relentless and methodical. The man’s face wasn’t covered, which was a very bad sign. He was wearing black robes that gave LARPer who takes himself really seriously , which wasn’t so much a bad sign—because Hob hadn’t encountered it before—as it was really weird. And he’d gone through a succession of torture implements in short bursts. A knife. A different, jagged knife. A taser. A red-hot metal poker. Boiling water. The man stepped away from the table periodically to look at something, but Hob had no idea what. He tried to talk to the man, but he didn’t explain anything. He just continued , silently. Hob had let his eyes slip shut, and then the rest of him had followed into darkness.
And now he was here. Alive, because Hob was always alive, but feeling a deep, rising terror.
You can be hurt, or captured .
This was, Hob thought, most definitively both.
Finally, Hob broke the surface of his pain and his thoughts, heralded by an unfamiliar voice.
“You’re not dead,” the voice said.
Hob opened his eyes. It was dark, and not just in Hob’s head. He blinked, again and again, trying to get his eyes to adjust. They did, slowly, his vision swimming and resolving into a dark room. There was someone sitting against the wall opposite him, posture oddly stiff.
“Can’t die,” Hob groaned. He laid still, trying to take a calculus of his injuries, then gave up. He hurt about equally bad all over.
Oddly, the man across the room seemed to pick up on the correct meaning immediately. “That’s…somewhat convenient,” he said.
“Yeah,” Hob agreed. His vision was slowly resolving. He turned his head to look at his conversation partner. The man across the room was more of a boy, really. He was shackled to the wall, something they had apparently not bothered with for Hob. Hob would have been offended, except he didn’t want to sit up, let alone something more dramatic.
“You’re not dead either,” he offered.
“I am,” the boy corrected. “I’ve been dead since 1916, I’m afraid.”
That made Hob sit up. He swore, instantly—it had been a bad idea, and he almost immediately collapsed over again. “You’re—what?”
“I’m dead,” the boy said. He tried to straighten himself up too, but hissed in pain and fell back into his previous lean against the wall. He wasn’t handcuffed, but there were chains on his ankles, and a thick iron collar around his neck. It seemed to cause him pain. “I’m a ghost. You’re not,” he added. “You’re not in Hell, or anything like that. Although I admit it bears some similarity.”
“Where are we?” Hob said, because he had too many questions, but that one felt the most pressing.
“A basement,” the boy said. “Of the house of a man who considers himself a mage. He hasn’t told me his name. He’s drawing energy from—hurt. From suffering. Anguish, properly converted, is a good source of magical power.”
“Oh,” Hob said. He almost asked how that worked, and then thought of a better question. “What’s your name?”
“Edwin Payne. What’s yours?”
“Robert Gadling,” he said. Then on an impulse, he added, “You can call me Hob, though. My friends do.”
“Are we friends?” Edwin asked.
“Well,” Hob said. “Not sure I’ll have any here otherwise, so I hope so.”
“Alright,” Edwin said. “Friends, then.”
“So,” Hob said. “Tell me more about what’s going on here.
---
Edwin laid it all out with a remarkable clarity; it was only through asides that Hob learned which pieces of it he’d been told outright and which he’d pieced together. The man was a mage, intent on performing some kind of magical ritual that required a tremendous amount of power. Power which, Edwin had said disparagingly, “He is certainly not in possession of.” Pain was a source of power.
Ghosts, Edwin explained, didn’t really experience pain very well. “We are not—corporeal. We are an idea. A spirit does not stay— as a spirit —without intent. So mostly ghosts just simply—dissolve when they have been made to hurt.”
“You haven’t,” Hob said.
“He was surprised by that,” Edwin said. “It’s that—I have been hurt rather a lot before, so you could say that I’m very good at it.” And he’d given Hob a grim little smile.
“That’s awful,” Hob said, because it was.
“Yes,” Edwin agreed. “I know. But what’s really careless is that you’re his—sixth person. Alive people don’t die that easily, it’s really just—awful that he’s been killing you at all. So it’s very lucky for him that you can’t die.”
“Yeah,” Hob said. “For me, too.”
“Yes,” Edwin said. “Not for me, though. Oh,” he shot Hob a guilty look. “I didn’t mean it like that. Except I was really hoping that one of them might become a ghost, or that he would kill enough people that someone would notice, and so my friends might be able to find out where I was. He has all of these wards up to prevent magical tracking,” he added, as though that was an obvious question Hob might have asked in response.
“Sorry,” Hob said, meaning it.
“You should not apologize for not being dead, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it,” Edwin said. “In any event, though, we will need a different plan. I don’t suppose you have any friends who may have cause to come looking for you?”
Hob thought about that. School was out for the summer, so he didn’t have the easy option of getting reported missing as soon as he didn’t turn up for work. It would be several more months before someone realized he wasn’t turning up for professional development ahead of the new term. He was by the Inn fairly frequently, but he didn’t have to be there, and he’d had periods of inactivity before; probably it would be at least a month before people started to question where he’d went. And while he had plenty of friends—the football league, his colleagues, the lads at the pub—none of them were in on his secret, and none of them would jump to something particularly sinister if he made himself scarce. Probably they’d think he had a new girl; he had a bad habit of disappearing in those early honeymoon weeks of a relationship.
There was Dream, of course, but even now that they’d given up on the every-hundred-years thing, they met on a time scale of months rather than days or weeks. Dream wouldn’t know to start looking for him for quite a while. He could get lucky, he supposed, and Dream could peek in on him on a whim. Hob couldn’t count on that, though.
“No,” Hob said. “Afraid I don’t.”
Edwin looked at him. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he offered, awkwardly gentle. “But, given that, it seems that it may be up to us. What is stopping you is the door, and the alarm. What is stopping me is the iron, and the spell. It’s somewhat unfortunate that none of those things exactly overlap, but I have—an idea, I suppose, for the iron, so if you will help me with the spell I will help you with the door and the alarm, and we can escape together.”
“I’m in,” Hob said. “Do you have a plan, then?”
“Not yet,” Edwin said, frowning. “But—now that I know what our parameters are, I will start to think of one.”
“I will, too,” Hob said. “Explain the spell thing. And the iron.”
“Iron burns ghosts,” Edwin said. “There’s also a spell—I said, there’s a spell here that presents tracking. There’s also one that prevents ghosts from leaving. I need to break that somehow or, even if I got out of the iron, I couldn’t leave the building. Also, there’s iron in a lot of the walls, so it’s convenient to go out the doors with you anyway. I don’t intend to abandon you.”
He said this with an incredible seriousness. It was—sweet, Hob thought, and it also ached a little. It was like Edwin had heard Hob say he didn’t have anyone, and had decided he was someone who needed to be taken care of. It was sweet because Edwin looked so terribly young; it ached because it did fill a void, in a way. Hob didn’t have anyone he could rely on in this, except that now he did.
“I won’t abandon you either,” Hob said. Then, because he’d had the thought, “How old are you?”
“Well—it’s, oh, twenty-twenty-four, and—”
“When you died,” Hob said. “How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
“That,” Hob said, “Is awful.”
Edwin shrugged. “Life is, I’m afraid,” he said.
“Can be wonderful, too,” Hob said. “I promise.”
“Well,” Edwin said. “Death—parts of it, anyhow—haven’t been half bad, so it all evens out in the end. Now. What did you notice in the other room?”
---
The two weeks that Hob spent in that basement were certainly on the side of life that was, as Edwin said, awful . The bright spot of it was Edwin, who Hob liked immediately. He was snarky on reflex, but kind in a deliberate way, incredibly single-minded towards their escape, and had a resilience that Hob could only marvel at.
It was, Hob thought, the strangest way he’d ever gotten to know someone. In a way, it was like being in the trenches, except even then there’d been something else, somewhere else—the orders, the letters, the slice of gray sky visible up above. This existence was somehow narrower than those walls of mud—this room, and the next. In one room, pain. In the other, the sound of screaming. And at night, the kind of conversation you made in the narrow journey between those two places, and sleep.
Well, sleep for Hob. Edwin didn’t, he’d explained. He could, however, be rendered unconscious in particular ways. The application of pain didn’t seem to do it.
Some nights, the pain was bad and Hob couldn’t sleep either. It reminded him of the long nights right after Eleanor died, when he and Robyn had sat up together and wept, when the world that had once seemed so big had turned so cold and constricted around him. He tried to describe this to Edwin, how this felt like that closing-in of the world, these two rooms.
“A two-chambered heart,” Edwin had said, after a long moment where Hob watched him turn it over in his head. “Half as big as it should be.”
“That’s good,” Hob told him, genuinely. “You ever write poetry?”
Edwin gave him an incredulous look and shook his head.
“You might be good at it,” Hob offered.
“I don’t have time for that,” Edwin said. “I’m a detective.”
And Hob was a history teacher, but they were neither detecting nor teaching—just suffering, and adrift. In another way, it was nothing like sitting up with Robyn. Back then, Hob had been trying so desperately to conceal his pain, to be strong for his son. There was some shame in finding that Edwin was the stoic one. Even when he was dragged inside trembling, eyes red-rimmed and tears streaking his face, he’d spend a few minutes curled into himself against the wall and then he’d sit up, flinching a bit every time he brushed the iron cuffs, and he’d say, “Well. Good evening,” and they’d talk until Hob fell asleep.
Hob didn’t have a routine. Some days he could shake it off. Some days he would just lie there, sick and weak and hurting and cursing the world. Some days the tears came and didn’t stop. He wasn’t good, Hob, at closing himself off to the world. Too many centuries of just letting himself feel it as it came, the good and the bad, the joy and the grief.
In the other room, he felt it, and then he tried to forget it. He didn’t know what he said to the sorcerer, how he screamed, how he might have pleaded and sobbed. He did know the sound of it when they hurt Edwin: how he would cry out, soft and wordless. How he would beg for them to stop. How, when things got very bad and he seemed, sometimes, to forget where he was, he would shout hysterically for someone called Charles.
Hob didn’t think he called for anyone. At least, when he thought about shouting, he couldn’t imagine who he’d scream for.
There is an intimacy, Hob thinks, in knowing someone in the worst moments of their life, at the dark edge of the world. He says this, too, to Edwin.
“This isn’t my worst moment,” Edwin said. He looked, afterwards, like he hadn’t meant to say it, but he didn’t take it back.
That was a night Hob didn’t sleep for an entirely different reason.
---
“Hob. Hob .” Edwin never woke him, which meant Hob didn’t understand what was happening for a moment. “I have a plan.”
“Oh,” Hob said. “Hang on.” The inside of his mouth tasted foul and bloody. His eyelids felt stuck together. Edwin waited, with poorly-concealed impatience, as he gathered himself together and hauled into a sitting position.
“Okay,” he said, ignoring the sick sticky feeling in his mouth. “What’s the plan?”
Edwin gave him a worried look, but continued anyway, which Hob appreciated. “I have identified—I believe—the spell that is making it impossible for me to pass out of this house. It is a circle, inscribed on the floor of the hallway between the rooms. I need you to damage the circle somehow. I would do it myself, but I do not—produce fluids, when I am injured.”
“You want me to bleed on it,” Hob realized.
“Yes,” Edwin said. “Anything that breaks either the circle or one of the symbols. Ideally both. They’re painted on, but blood usually has a particular effect, in magic, so I expect it will work.”
“I’ll do it,” Hob said. “What about the rest? The iron—you said you had a plan. The alarm?”
“I know a spell,” Edwin said. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I believe I remember it. It would be better with the book, but—well, anyway, I’m almost certain I remember it. As for the door, I believe it does not lock from the exterior, so—I can simply phase through the door and open it. Assuming you’ve broken the circle preventing me from doing so.”
“You’ve got it all planned out,” Hob said, impressed. “I’m feeling kind of useless here.”
“You can be the brawn,” Edwin said, primly. “I have been told before that I am the brains of the operation.”
Hob found himself smiling. There was something incredibly magical about hope that seemed to dull all the bad things and make all the good things brighter. And this was a lot of hope indeed.
“Bleed on the circle,” he said. “I’ve got it. I’m great at bleeding.”
“Excellent,” Edwin said, and there was a hint of a smile on his face as well—not just a grim, well isn’t the torture we’re going through interesting one, but a real one.
“It’s you, today, though,” Hob said. “It’ll have to—tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Edwin said. “Today is nothing. Tomorrow, we are going home.”
The way he said the last word, home , stabbed Hob in the heart.
“Home,” Hob agreed. “Tomorrow.”