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You’re late.
It seems I owe you an apology. I’ve always heard it impolite to keep one’s friends waiting.
—
Hob grins and raises a hand, summoning the waitress. Sarah—a young mom, works the second shift when her wife is home from teaching and can watch the baby—comes over right away, the benefits of being a regular and friendly.
It would be easy in this life to get lonely, and so Hob makes friends. It means he has to leave a little more regularly than he might otherwise, but it’s worth it.
“Good evening, Rob!” she greets him cheerfully. “Ready for another one?” she nods at his three-quarters-empty glass of beer. “What about your friend?”
“Sure,” he says. “What’ll you have?”
His stranger—his friend, he has said they’re friends; Hob won’t call him a stranger any longer—blinks slowly like he wasn’t expecting the question. Then he says, “Nothing for me, thank you.”
“Come on, my treat,” Hob says, and when he gets no reaction, says, “Well, a water then, thank you Sarah.”
“No problem,” she says and departs.
“It’s actually better here,” Hob tells his friend. “The ale, I mean. Although it was piss-poor before and you drank it. Food’s not bad, either.”
His friend’s lips press together. His initial smile is gone, and there is a weariness on his face that looks ill on him. “I am alright, thank you.”
“You don’t seem alright,” Hob says, then immediately raises a hand to forestall objection. “Alright, I know that’s not what you were saying, and you weren’t happy the last time I pushed, so I won’t. But as we are friends, consider it a friendly interest in how you’ve been doing.”
“I have,” his friend says, slow and considered, “Not been doing well. Thank you. How are you keeping, my friend?” The words have such a soft cadence to them that the meaning doesn’t hit Hob until a few heartbeats into the following silence.
“I—no, wait, hold on,” Hob says. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong,” his friend says, and it is not too slow or too fast; it sounds exactly right. Hob hears it and thinks, this is the truth. “All is well now.”
“It wasn’t before?” Hob asks.
Before his friend can answer, Sarah returns with the beer and the water. “You need anything else, let me know,” she says.
“Thanks, Sarah.”
“Thank you.” Hob wonders, a little cynically, if his friend is thanking her for the water or the interruption, but before he can repeat it, his friend says, “I did not intend to keep you waiting.”
Hob waves it off. “What’s thirty years?” he says. “Water under the bridge.” It hurt, a gut-stab of loneliness and regret that lingered a little bit, like a bitter aftertaste, but his friend has returned, and he’s over it now.
“I was unavoidably detained, ” he says, as though Hob hasn’t spoken.
“Detained,” Hob says, about to ask what could hold someone up for thirty years. But the word— detained —catches on a hook in his brain, and a memory resurfaces of his friend saying you can still be hurt, or captured. “Like—” he lets it hang in the air.
To his surprise, he gets a real answer. “I was trapped and held captive by a magician called Roderick Burgess,” he says. His eyes are fixed on the wall past Hob, or maybe through it like he’s seeing beyond it. “And then by his son Alexander.”
“Alexander Burgess?” Hob says because the name rings a bell. “I just read something about—” the penny drops. “His obituary. I just read his obituary on Tuesday.”
His friend meets his eyes. There’s a coldness to them. “His father meant to trap my sister and caught me instead.”
“You have a sister?” Hob asks, without meaning to speak. “Sorry, sorry.” It’s just that he’s learned more about his friend in the past five minutes than in the previous six hundred years. “What happened next?”
“Then he wanted a gift from me I could not give, and would not let me go until I gave it. His son was long overdue the gift I gave him.” There’s an uncanny quality to the word gift, as though the very syllables have attained malevolence in his friend’s mouth.
Hob’s own mouth is suddenly very dry. “How long have you—when did you escape?”
His friend frowns, staring at the wall. “It is Friday,” he says. “So…in your reckoning of time, Tuesday.”
“Fuck,” Hob slumps back. “ You were trapped for thirty years?”
“No.” He shakes his head. His long, pale fingers tap at the water glass, which he hasn’t even sipped. “One hundred and sixteen years.”
Hob almost knocks his beer off the table. “ Fucking shit.”
To his surprise, his friend smiles. “That is an appropriate term for it.”
“Do you—can I do something?” Hob fumbles. It feels like a chill has just run through him. “You sure you don’t want food? It must taste really good now, huh, that you can have whatever you want?” He’s panicking, the familiar feeling of it somehow tightening his throat and loosening his tongue at the same time. Probably he should just shut up. But while he isn’t sure what the right response is to the idea of his friend being held captive for more than a century — he can’t even quite wrap his head around the horror of that concept—he knows that silence isn’t it.
“I wouldn’t know,” his friend says.
“You eat,” Hob says, and then it becomes a question. “I’ve seen you eat?”
“You have,” he confirms. “But, as with you, I do not need to eat to live.”
“But you can still get hungry,” Hob says. “Can’t you?”
“Yes,” he says. “But—humans, do you have it where you are hungry, and you only remain hungry so long, and then you stop being hungry?” His blue eyes meet Hob’s brown ones, and it feels as though they hold a memory between them of Hob at the old inn, wolfing down food. Do you know how hungry you can get when you can’t die?
“And then it comes back,” Hob says. An unpleasant feeling gnaws at his gut, not unlike the sensation of hunger itself. “But yes, it comes and goes.”
His friend nods. “I have found that after…some time, it is no longer a unique sensation.”
“What does that mean?”
“Do you feel your skin, Hob Gadling? Your bones?”
“No,” he says.
“Hunger, too, can be a part of you,” he says.
“But it still hurts, doesn’t it?” Hob presses. “Even when you—I mean, you can be used to something and it still hurts.”
After a long pause of consideration, his friend says, “Perhaps.”
Hob swallows hard and braces himself for a fight. He has never met anyone as stubborn as his friend, but this feels like a hill to die on. “It may be impolite to keep a friend waiting, but it’s much worse to let a friend hurt when there’s something you can do about it,” he says. “I have enough regrets, so—please have dinner with me.”
Hob knows how this is going to go: his friend will refuse, and then he’ll have to decide whether to keep pushing and risk him storming out. And then he’s going to have to sit with what he just learned, alone, unable to do anything—
“…Alright.”
Hob just barely manages to bite back a shocked response. He can’t act surprised, though, can’t draw attention to the fact that this is his friend giving in; he’s quite sure of that. “A-alright. Sarah!” he calls, raising a hand to get her attention.
“Another drink?” she greets cheerfully, crossing over to the table. “Something for you?” she looks at his friend.
“Something to eat, I think,” Hob says. He looks at his friend, who—he’s seen him drink before, eat occasionally, but has never gotten a real sense of preferences. It seems like the wrong time to ask. “How about—one of everything.”
“One of—” she starts to say in surprise, and he gives her a little, pleading look. Please just go with it. I am trying so hard not to spook him. “One of everything!” she agrees, instantly cheerful again. “Any particular order you want?”
“No, just bring them out as they’re ready,” he says.
“Sure thing,” she smiles at the both with only a bit of question in her eyes and steps away.
“That was unnecessary,” his friend says once she’s gone.
“You haven’t eaten in a hundred and sixteen years,” Hob returns. “You’ve missed a lot of culinary developments. I think it’s entirely necessary.”
He gets a faint line of a smile in response, thin as a knife blade.
“So, Hob Gadling,” his friend says. “Tell me of your last century.”
If his friend had shown up on time thirty years ago, Hob would have had it all planned out. He tended to start to think about it in the days leading up to it, remembering the highlights, the headlines. He kept a journal, on and off; he would forget to write in it for a time until something happened, and he would think, I’ll have to tell my Stranger about this, and then he’ll go and write it down.
He’s continued that since his friend missed their last meeting, but he wasn’t expecting to see him here today and wasn’t prepared. So he just starts with the first thing he can think of. “I’m teaching,” he says. “History. Sixth form. They’re—kids. It’s been a long time since I spent time with kids. They’re so young. It’s good. It’s refreshing.”
His friend nods, and so Hob keeps going, rambling really—about his classes, about technology; he pulls out his smartphone and starts showing him the games. He flicks open Tetris, and he gets a reaction. “Oh,” he says. “Some of you dream about this.”
“What?” Hob says.
He doesn’t get an answer because that’s when Sarah comes back with a basket of brown bread and compound butter. His friend’s attention is entirely on it, like it’s a snake that might bite him.
Hob very deliberately doesn’t comment. Instead, he takes a roll and spreads some butter on it, takes a bite, and resumes talking through it. “So, cell phones! But they’ve got nothing on the internet. You used to just not know things, and now you can look them up!” He continues without a pause, watching as his friend picks up a roll very carefully, neatly splits it, and butters it meticulously—the layer perfectly even, precisely to the edges of both halves of the roll.
The roll just sits on his plate for a moment, and Hob wonders if he’s just going to keep it there as an art piece, but finally, he picks it up and takes a bite.
The change is almost immediate; his friend chews slowly, swallows, and then takes another bite without pause. There’s nothing overt about it—he doesn’t rip into it like a starving animal. There’s no savagery. But in those quick, efficient movements, there is an edge of desperation. He eats the roll without pausing and picks up another. This one, he doesn’t split in half, just slathers the butter onto the top and begins devouring it.
Hob says nothing about it. There is nothing to say. He can’t imagine any comment—however innocuous, however good-natured—will be taken well. He simply needs to pretend he doesn’t see it at all.
Instead, Hob talks. He names every one of his students that he can remember. He talks about the internet, backtracks to dial-up, the evolution of smartphones, how great it was when Margaret Thatcher died and “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” climbed the charts and then backtracks to explain both Margaret Thatcher and The Wizard of Oz. He only stops his monologue to thank Sarah as she brings dish after dish to the table—tempura green beans, slices of ahi tuna that are seared on the outside and delicately pink in the middle, blue tortilla crisps with creamy spinach artichoke dip, shrimp dripping with garlic butter, steaming shishito peppers topped with sea salt.
Through it all, his friend eats. He inhales three bread rolls before Sarah even arrives with the second dish and shows no signs of slowing down. At first, he waits for Hob to take from a dish before he begins to work his way through it, but then he doesn’t wait for that—he eats the full plate of shrimp by himself and most of the creamy mashed potatoes that follow, scraping the skins off the bottom of his bowl.
Sarah is a little wide-eyed at it, but consummate professional that she is, she doesn’t say anything. The table is covered with full dishes, which are emptied, covered, and emptied again. Hob indiscriminately updates him on every aspect of the past century while his friend indiscriminately devours the inn’s full blend of traditional fare and gastropub-influenced dishes: spinach and mushrooms with garlic, crisp steaming fish and chips, a rich beef stew with potatoes, a French-dip sandwich which he somehow soaks in the broth without spilling a drop, and then drains the cup of broth.
Hob finishes his beer and takes Sarah up on her offer of another, talks through mouthfuls of a pork sandwich because he’s worried his friend will feel self-conscious in the silence. The desperate edge, eventually, goes out of it. The precision of his eating begins to feel genuine rather than a clinging to control; he stops wiping out every drop of dip or sauce from a plate.
Eventually, the dishes stop coming, and his friend has slowed down enough to actually respond to the things Hob is saying—he asks a question about the moon landing; he makes a comment in response to Hob talking about how London has changed, about their old inn being gone. He thinks he’s being circumspect about his involvement, but his friend sets down his fork and says abruptly, “You own this establishment?”
“Really it’s zoning—what?” Hob cuts himself off, sheepish. “Well…I don’t run it, don’t have the time. But I put some money in it, yeah.” He doesn’t say that he had to make sure that his friend had a place to come back to, to meet him, if he ever changed his mind about seeing Hob again. (Except he hadn’t changed his mind, he’d been trapped.)
His friend nods slowly. He doesn’t ask, so Hob tries to swallow down the explanations that automatically try to escape his teeth.
Sarah comes back and scoops up another set of cleared dishes. “That’s all of them,” she says cheerfully. “Dessert?”
“What pies’ve we got today?” Hob asks. “I think we could each do a slice.”
“I’ve got apple, berry, peach and French Silk,” she rattles off.
“French Silk,” Hob selects. “Sounds fancy.”
“It’s a chocolate cream,” she says. “It’s great. And you?”
There’s a beat of silence. Sarah shifts a little on her heel in a way Hob thinks is unconscious, but he doesn’t blame her because his friend is looking at her, and he’s got a very intense gaze even when he doesn’t mean anything by it. His eyes are less blue like the sky and more blue like the ocean—like there’s something roiling underneath it all, no matter how clear the color.
“…apple,” he says. “Thank you.”
“Coming right up,” she says.
“Apple’s good,” Hob says. “Traditional.”
“Mm.” His friend seems to be working up to saying something, so Hob doesn’t try to fill the silence. Then, unexpectedly: “My sister tried to give me one.”
“Your sister.” The second time the sister had come up today. “Tried to give you an—apple?”
“Yes. She said she was worried about me.” He pronounces the last three words very precisely.
“Did she know about the—hundred and sixteen years?” Hob can’t blame her for being worried about him if it’s that. “I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“Yes,” he says. “You have not met her, and will not unless you change your mind about her gift.”
“Her—” Hob is lost immediately. “What?”
“I will ask for formality’s sake, then. Hob Gadling, do you wish to seek death?”
“No!” Hob says a little too loudly. He forces his next words to be quieter. “No, of course not. You know that by now. What does that have to do with your…” he slows down, starting to string things together. “…sister.”
“Death is my sister,” he answers.
“Your sister is Death.”
He nods.
“Okay, cool, just wanted to make sure I got that right.” Hob reminds himself how to breathe. “She tried to give you an apple.”
“She did,” he agrees. “She likes them.”
Death likes apples, is a woman, and Hob’s old stranger is her brother. Hob Gadling is learning all sorts of things tonight. “Older or younger?” he asks like a regular person has just told him about their sibling.
“She is older,” he answers. “I have two other sisters, younger. A brother, older, and a brother younger, and a younger sibling who is neither.”
Hob is frantically committing the details to memory. “So Death, is she the oldest?”
“Destiny is the oldest of us,” he says. “When the first creature could have a destiny, however small, he was born. Death followed him, because what can live can die.”
“And then—you,” Hob checks, looking up at him. He gets a tiny nod in return. “What can live can die can…”
“Dream,” he says. “I am Dream of the Endless, king of dreams and lord of nightmares.”
“Dream,” Hob repeats. “Six hundred years and I finally got your name.”
“I have others,” Dream says. “Morpheus. Oneiros. The Sandman.”
“The—” Hob slaps himself in the face. “I saw the damned sand.”
Dream gives him that tiny smile. “You did.”
“Dream,” Hob says, half-giddy with it. He feels almost drunk, which he definitely isn’t, not on two beers with a decent amount of food.
“So you’re a god,” Hob says.
Dream shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I am an anthropomorphic personification of the ability to dream in the universe. Hopes. Fears. Stories. They are within me and a part of me.”
“That’s how you know their names,” Hob says. “Everyone’s name. Including mine.”
“That is how,” Dream says.
“Because you know our dreams,” Hob says.
He inclines his head slightly.
Before he can think of his next question, Sarah comes back. “Alright,” she sets down the plates of pie, one in front of each of them. “French silk and apple.”
“Thank you,” Dream says, and Hob echoes him.
When Sarah walks away, Hob asks, “What does she dream about?”
“I think,” Dream says, picking up his fork, “That would be a violation of her privacy.”
“No, you’re right,” Hob agrees immediately. Then he says, a little reproachfully, “You told me all those things about Lushing Lou.”
“That—” Dream starts to retort, and then he cuts himself off. “I did not think it would make you think worse of her, but you are right; I should not have done it.” He presses down with the side of his fork on the pie, slicing off the point of it. The triangle of flaky golden pastry and soft baked apple sits on the tines; Dream studies it for a moment before popping it in his mouth.
“It didn’t,” Hob says; it actually gave him a deeper sympathy, a sense of her as a real person. God, is that what they’re all like to Dream? Does he look at a person and get all the complexity of them in a glance?
When he asks this, Dream goes very still. He has brought the fork back down, and the tines rest on the top of the crust, not quite pressing down enough to break into it. “Yes, and—no.”
Hob lets him take another bite of pie, chew, and swallow before he prompts, “What does that mean? You don’t have to tell me—I’m just curious. You’ve been very forthcoming tonight.”
“My sister,” Dream says, after a pause. “I went with her, today.”
“Went with her to—” Hob cuts off.
“To her appointments,” Dream says. Which is—gift, appointment, Dream has used all sorts of words for death tonight that are softer than anything Hob might have called it. But he supposes if Death is your older sister, perhaps you have a different view of it. “She is not like me. She is—good with you. With humans.”
At least he knows, Hob thinks, with another surge of giddiness. Dream gives him a look that says, I know what you’re thinking, and Hob, with some difficulty, forces the smile off his face.
“We spent—so little time. And yet…it was hard. To see them, in those moments, and let them go. All of them, they say, is this it? Isn’t there more time? And I wanted it too, with them. And I hardly knew them.”
Hob has rarely heard Dream say so much at once. He would not have called his friend emotional ever before, but there is a strange quality to his soft words, as though they are filling up and spilling over with some feeling that words were not meant to contain.
Dream is looking at him, and he is not smiling, but his eyes are shining. If he were anyone else, Hob would think he was about to cry.
“And then I thought about you.”
“About—” Hob drops the fork that he hadn’t even remembered he was holding, startling himself with the sound of metal against ceramic. “About me?”
“I was caring, ” he enunciates the word with such amazement and disdain all at once, “About these people who were dying, dead, who I had known for only a minute before they went on to the Sunless Lands. And so—yes. My friend. I have known you six hundred years. I am sorry for how I left things between us.”
“Forgiven,” Hob says. “Forgotten. Water under the bridge. I—” he shakes his head. He reaches out a hand towards him but ends up chickening out and setting it on the table between them. “Dream.”
“I have not answered your question,” Dream says. “You are all—complex, yes. Stories. But there are so many of you, and it is—I know you all, but I do not know you well.” Then he corrects, “I know you well.”
Hob just stares at him and then laughs, shaking his head. “Dream.” He thinks he might be on the verge of tears himself. “I am so glad to see you again.”
“And I you.” Dream neatly bisects the rest of his pie slice with his fork and goes back to eating.
“How is it?” Sarah swings back by as they are both finishing. “Ready for the check?”
“It is good,” Dream says after he swallows. It’s the first comment he’s made on the actual quality of the food all night.
“They make a great apple pie,” Hob says. “They sell them, actually.”
“We do,” Sarah agrees. “Want one to take home?”
“Not tonight,” Hob says easily. Sarah nods, about to go, and then:
“Yes,” Dream says suddenly.
“I’ll bring one,” Sarah says, scooping up the plates.
“I thought I might bring one to my sister,” Dream says by way of explanation, and then, almost defensively, “She told me not to be a stranger.”
“I’m sure she’d be glad to see you,” Hob says.
Dream, unexpectedly, laughs.
“What?” Hob says.
“She said the same about you,” he says.
“Your sister knows me?” Hob is surprised.
“How else?” Dream asks. “ I do not have the power to keep someone alive centuries past his natural time.”
“Huh,” Hob says because he doesn’t know what else to say. “Well, she’s right. I was glad to see you. And I would be glad to see you again,” he adds before he can lose his nerve again. “It doesn’t have to be a hundred years.”
Dream nods slowly. “Perhaps,” he says, but Hob has the feeling that it’s a yes.
“You know where to find me,” Hob says. “Anytime. I mean it.”
Dream looks at him, and Hob holds his gaze.
“I think you do,” Dream says, almost wonderingly. When he settles his arm on the table again, the very tips of his fingers brush the upturned side of Hob’s palm. Hob doesn’t move, just sits with his oldest friend in the most familiar silence he knows until the check comes.