Chapter Text
“Excuse me,” Will mutters as he pushes past a woman’s shopping cart. He doesn’t have to meet her eyes to feel her annoyed glance crawl up his back.
Around him, the grocery store is bustling, layers of voices mixing with the holiday music coming in through the speakers above. “Don’t you think this would’ve been easier yesterday?” he asks Molly as he approaches their cart. He’s never liked grocery shopping.
She turns toward him after picking up a head of lettuce. “You remember last year. I don’t want any comments from Aunt Eloise about how we bought the beef two days in advance.”
Will sighs. Yes, he remembers. He holds up two boxes of pasta. “Which ones?”
“I don’t know. What do you think, Wally?” she asks the boy hanging on the cart.
“The curly one,” Wally says decisively. He’s a kid who's always sure about what he wants, and it manifests in everything he does. Will likes that about him, envies it in part.
“Curly one it is,” Will says, setting it down next to the lettuce. Wally smiles briefly before his face settles back into its ever-present seriousness.
Will places a hand atop his head, and the kid, pouty and short, gazes up at him evenly. “Can you do something for us?” he asks, and after his hand receives a nod, he turns him and points to the left. “Go get us some toilet paper from that aisle over there.”
Wally nods again and runs off, lighter from having a task of his own and determined in his own 11-year-old way.
Molly, who has moved on to picking out tomatoes, looks up at him. “How do you think he’s holding up this year?”
Will shakes his head. “Always hard to tell with him.”
“You’re alike in that way,” she notes, “but you can always tell better than I can.”
“That sounds like something you resent,” he says curiously. He rips off a plastic bag for her and rubs it open.
“No, never. I appreciate it.”
Will hums. “I think he gets better every year. It doesn’t weigh on him as much anymore, and nor does his responsibility.”
“Yeah,” she huffs, swiping away her blonde bangs. Always an indicator that she’s getting upset. “What I do resent is David making him promise that. What a responsibility for a dying father to place on his six-year-old.” Will says nothing, but places a calming hand on her back.
“Dad!” Wally calls. “Dad, can we get this?” He comes bounding up to Will, holding out a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal.
“I thought I told you to get toilet paper,” Will says.
“There wasn’t any. Please, can we get it?” he pleads.
“We have cereal at home, Bud. You don’t even like cinnamon.”
He watches Wally deflate as Molly speaks from behind him. “No toilet paper? That’s strange.”
“And no water and no bread,” a lanky, graying man comments from the cart beside theirs.
“People are stocking up,” his plump wife adds.
Molly furrows her brows. “For what?”
Most days they make an effort not to watch the news.
The man waves dismissively. “Ah, people going crazy about nothing again. Something happening in Boston—”
“And Reston,” a woman chimes in from beside Molly. “The government is closing down the roads, I saw it. They’ve set up a detour for the parkway.”
“My brother-in-law said it’s some sickness spreading,” the husband informs.
“Sickness?” Will echos.
“Nonsense, Jonah,” Jonah’s wife laughs and addresses Will, who skips out on the eye contact. “My sister said it’s a major gas leak.”
The other woman steps in again. “In two cities at once? Really.”
Will tunes them out as they continue to discuss amongst themselves and turns to Wally when he feels him tug on his coat.
“Please?” he asks again, shaking the cereal.
“Go put it back,” Will instructs, nudging him toward the aisle.
Wally’s frown settles deeper, and he makes his way to return it. Will feels a twinge of guilt as he watches his orange and black jacket disappear into a sea of others.
They have to take the detour on their way home.
The cracked asphalt of the residential roads bumps under their tires as the glowing, red sun sets ahead of them. Molly likes to listen to 70s music as she drives, and Will is in the process of tuning it out when he hears Wally pipe up from the backseat.
“Look!” Wally points to the centerline of the road. Ahead of them, lies a large hunk of meat, still wet and bleeding.
“Poor animal,” Molly frowns. “Birds must have gotten to it.”
“Must have been starving. Can’t even tell what it was,” Will says as they pass it. For a second, he imagines a torn-off piece of human skin glistening in the mess, but quickly clears the image from his mind. He swallows, suddenly imagining Hannibal somewhere in the trees.
His heart beats a little faster.
“Must have broke down,” he hears, bringing him back to the present.
“What?” Will asks, looking at Molly.
“Car.” She nods ahead of them at a blue Volkswagen on the side of the road. All of its doors have been left wide open.
“Yeah. Must have.” Will turns toward the window and lets the 70s music fill his head instead of the skin and Hannibal.
Hannibal would be for later.
---
The fireplace warms him as Will sits on the couch in front of it with Wally’s head in his lap. With one of his hands, he runs his fingers through the boy’s dark hair, and with the other, he holds the book he’s reading aloud.
The gentle clatter of utensils comes from the kitchen, where Molly is making dinner. The dogs snooze contentedly in front of the fire.
Wally has stated that he is too old for a lot of things, but never says anything of this. The first time he had asked Will to read to him, it was to reread the first novel his late father had read to him.
As he turns the page, he catches a glimpse of Wally’s expression, thoughtful and fully invested in the characters’ plight. He pictures the scenes and characters running through his head as they did through Will’s own on the rare occasion he was able to scrape up the money for a new book in his childhood.
He hopes that the vivid feelings and motivations fade for Wally with time, unlike they did for him.
The phone rings in the kitchen and Molly lays down her knife, rushing to pick it up.
“Hello?” Will hears from the kitchen, and then she comes to the doorway of the living room. “It’s Uncle Elliot,” she says with the phone to her neck, and by that, she means one of her many brothers who are driving up from Tampa.
Wally looks up at Will when he stops reading. “And then what happened?” he urges, nudging Will’s hand with his head. Will just smooths down his hair as Molly listens and the fire crackles.
“That’s a shame,” she says after a pause, tone dejected, a bit concerned. “No, don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault. We’ll be ready for you when you get in.” She walks over to sit on the back of the couch, pushing her husband's hair out of his face when he turns to look at her. “Charleston’s been blocked off. They’re gonna be late.”
“How late?” Will asks, and she relays the question through the phone.
“6 P.M. tomorrow.”
“What do you think, Wally?” he asks, glancing down at the boy. “Think you can wait for presents until your cousins get here?” Wally crosses his arms and nods.
Molly smiles at them. “We’ll have dinner ready then and— Hello?” The phone, audibly to Will, crackles and beeps in her hand. “Hello? Elliot?” She gets up as she examines the tiny home phone screen. “Huh. Our service is gone.”
Will reaches to pick up his cell from the end table. “Internet, too.”
“Well, then,” Molly sighs as she heads back to the kitchen. “Dinner in ten.”
Will slides the bookmark in between the pages and pats Wally’s side to get him up. “Go wash up.”
“Wait, Dad, just finish the chapter. Do you think Ben will find Henry?”
He is referring to the characters in their book, which Will finds surprisingly applicable to his own life, given its absurd plot. In the last chapter, Henry tricked his best friend, Ben, into something he didn’t want to do, which turned out to be for Ben’s benefit. Before he found that out, upset, Ben cast away his friend into a fantasy land.
“I think he will. Someday,” Will replies as Wally sits up.
“Do you think Ben feels bad for banishing him into The Barren?”
Will pauses. “I think he does. Do you know what regret means?” he asks the boy gently.
“When you wish you didn’t do something?”
“Exactly.”
“Do you regret anything?” Wally looks at Will as if he’s transparent. There’s no use lying to a kid like him.
“Sometimes,” Will tells him. “You can never do everything right. Now, go.”
They have chicken and Wally’s favorite curly pasta for dinner, and afterward, when Wally is in bed, Will and Molly wrap presents, which proves to be quite a feat because, for the first time since they got married, Molly’s entire family is gathering at their house.
Just the thought of it all drains him.
Will doesn’t have any blood relatives to invite. Or friends, for that matter, but that’s beside the point. It always is when Molly brings it up, anyway.
In bed that night, Will can’t seem to fall asleep, which isn’t unusual, but more frequent as of late. He wonders if the clock has already ticked past midnight and it’s now Christmas.
Molly’s family will be coming over at noon, and Molly, herself, lays sound asleep next to him. She has gotten used to his constant tossing and turning and learned to sleep through it all. She doesn’t even wake up anymore when Will shoots up, gasping for breath and terrified.
He used to wake her up when she first started sleeping through his nightmares, seeking comfort, but he doesn’t do that anymore. She never helped him in any real way anyway. On the nights when the darkness from the past comes to consume him, there seems to only be one train of thought, a flame, dangerous and bright, that can scatter it. Hannibal.
Will pictures the way Hannibal would sit him down in his office after years apart and dismantle his monsters with him metaphor by metaphor and limb by limb, burning them to a crisp.
In this house, there is laughter and a fireplace, but not the conflagration he misses. There is also security, but with that, longing. More and more often, he finds himself retreating to Hannibal’s office: during their banal conversations over dinner, while throwing a baseball back and forth with Wally outside, during sex with Molly.
Will has been staring up at the ceiling for what seemed like hours now, and he finally closes his eyes.
“Back already, Will?” Hannibal asks in his mind, voice gliding over him and sending shivers down his spine.
“You know I can’t stay away,” Will sighs. He taps his fingers on the leather armrest. “You like that.”
In his fantasies, Will imagines Hannibal is happy to see him. In reality, maybe he has already moved on, regretted his choice.
“How long do you plan for this to continue?” Hannibal’s eyes stay on Will as he gets up from his chair and slowly begins to wander the room. “This escapist fantasy of yours must have a limit of efficacy. There must be a tipping point, at which your desire will force you to see me face to face.”
Will shakes his head. “I have gotten awfully good at denying myself of my desires. Better than you remember.” He looks up toward the bookshelves and tries to convince himself that what he said is true.
The rows of books have started to blur into a mess of colors in his mind; he is forgetting the room chunk by chunk. The curtains had become mismatched long ago. Were the red stripes thick or the white?
It stings him.
When he turns away from the shelves, Hannibal is standing right behind him, a bit too close, looking at him with the polite adoration Will caught when he woke up after Muskrat Farms, when Ben cast away Henry.
“It is a shame. After all that time we spent working to bring your desire to the surface.” Hannibal reaches for his hand, taking it between his own two, twisting his wedding band with his thumb and forefinger. “Tell me, Will, what do you desire most of all?”
Will looks at their hands together. For a second, Hannibal’s appear transparent.
He is about to answer when his eyes fly open at a sudden noise. They darted around the dark room, seeing nothing, but he can recognize that sound anywhere: splitting wood, a door torn off its hinges. It’s the sound he spent all his time dreading in his old house in Wolf Trap.
Molly has sat up next to him as well. The dogs start to bark up a storm downstairs, and soon their woofs and howls travel outside into the yard.
While he quickly and quietly pulls on a pair of sweatpants and shoes, he hears two voices come from downstairs, two pairs of shuffling feet. Their words carry without consideration for volume, but Will can’t make out a full sentence no matter how hard he tries.
“Will,” Molly whispers, panicked, from her place on the bed. “What do we do?”
“Call the police,” Will orders as he crosses back to the bedside drawer, takes out his M9, and begins the work to load it. Molly reaches over and grabs her phone.
The artificial light illuminates the lines in her face. “The service is still down.”
Will glances toward the door. “I’ll go. Get Wally and get in the car.”
“No, I’m going with you.” She reaches in the drawer Will is about to close and gets his knife. “There’s two of them. There should be two of us.”
Will is about to object, but Molly wastes no time. She’s at the door before he is.
They creep down the stairs, not making a single noise. Will feels Molly’s silent breath on his neck. She grips the knife at her side and Will keeps the gun pointed out in front of him.
Once they get to the bottom, Will motions for her to investigate the moonlit porch outside while he goes into the living room. She nods and they split, the darkness of the hall engulfing him as he turns away from the front door.
In the living room, which he now sees is empty, he can see that the back door leading to their wrap-around porch has been opened.
The silence that consumes the house is the type that rings in the ears deafeningly, calling all attention to it. Piercing it, he hears something outside creak slowly and steadily, and then, the air is saturated with a wordless scream unlike one he’s ever heard before, but unmistakably Molly’s.
As he rushes to the front door without regard for whatever lurks in the dark corners of their house, her scream grows garbled, like she’s choking. Indeed, when he stops in the doorway, the first thing he sees is the pints of bubbling blood spilling from her mouth as she lays convulsing on the wood, throat torn to shreds.
The second thing he sees is the woman crouched over her. No, not a woman, but an animal, an alien, a monster clad in a dress tearing at Molly’s stomach. It looks up at him with crazed eyes— emotional, yellowed, bloodshot eyes and screeches, “Rain! Rain! Rain!”
It starts toward him and he pulls the trigger, sinking a bullet into its stomach. When it doesn’t falter, he fires three more times. The creature presses toward him still, and he aims higher, firing a final bullet through its head. Only then, brains splattering wetly on the wall behind it, does it crumple to the ground.
He rushes toward his wife, whose lovely, gray eyes have rolled to the back of her head. The whites of them have started to cloud over with a yellow screen, red seeping into their corners. Will reaches out to touch her arm, but retracts his hand quickly when he sees that her skin has begun to peel like the creature’s had, revealing the red muscle underneath and bleeding beyond control.
Will swallows dryly and backs away, heart beating out of his chest, eyes darting from place to place. This cannot be Molly, it can’t, he thinks, but alas, it is.
For once, he finds himself wishing he were in a nightmare, but he isn’t; the blood splatter on his face feels too warm and familiar, and the gun in his hand is too heavy and cold.
It takes a rustle in the woods for him to remember the second voice he heard, the second creature stalking them. He turns away from Molly and rushes back into the house, up to Wally’s room.
He finds him trembling under the bed, silent tears racking his small body. Shock still coursing through every inch of him, Will pulls Wally out and shoves his feet into the closest pair of shoes he finds, lacing them up quickly and speaking to him in an urgent whisper. “We need to go. Now.” Will stands and pulls him to his feet, grabbing a jacket out of his closet.
“Where’s Mom?” Wally rasps. When Will doesn’t answer, he asks louder. “Where’s my mom?”
“Shh!” Will presses a finger to the boy’s lips, listening for footsteps or a whisper or any sound at all. When there is nothing, he pulls Wally with him toward the door.
Halfway down the stairs, he hears a man’s voice. Only he knows it doesn’t belong to a man. “Suntan! Mountain! Caveat…” It’s coming from the kitchen.
They pause on the stairs for a few moments before Will leans down to Wally’s ear, grips his hand, and whispers, “Run.” They take off, bounding down the rest of the stairs and down the hall. Will looks back to see the creature coming after them. It’s faster than the first one, able to run.
“What is that?” Wally cries. “What is that!”
Will grabs the car keys off their hook as they cross the threshold. Wally halts at the sight of his mom, but Will pulls him forward.
“No! We have to help her!” When Wally starts to struggle, Will hoists him over his shoulder, ignoring his pounding fists and kicking legs. “What are you doing? She’s dying!”
Will doesn’t have the heart to tell him she’s way past that point.
He unlocks the car and throws Wally inside as the creature descends the few steps in front of their porch.
Slamming the door shut, he starts the car. The creature throws its body into the door, cracking the glass, and Wally shrieks. Will puts the car into reverse and pushes all the way down on the gas pedal, rushing the car out of their long driveway and onto the road.
The creature runs after them, hunched, arms swinging in front of it. It howls into the night as they speed away.