Chapter Text
Charlie’s throat is full of blood.
His toes graze the ground, just enough to know he’s barely even suspended, but all he can do with them is gently sway in place. When he does, he becomes all the more aware of the piece of metal that’s been punctured through the underside of his jaw, lifting his chin skyward and forcing his head to tip back, mouth agape, to keep the flesh from tearing. The hook has punctured through his tongue, preventing him from swallowing, and so the blood pools, cooling, in his throat. He can feel it in the space between the inside of his lip and his lower row of teeth.
The room is inconceivably dark, with no clues as to where he is other than slimy, wet soil underneath his feet and the stench of death, infused in the taste of his own blood. Nor does he know how long he’s been here, suspended by the jaw, half of a hangman. He is convinced that this, this one has to be the worst one so far, though he knows that's soon to change. Whatever was before this—he can’t remember anymore, his memories splinter like dry kindling in his mind—had been, at the time, the worst punishment by far. As was the torture before that, and before that. Now he’d kill to go back to any of them, to feel any at all other than this.
He can feel his sanity fracturing, like hearing ice cracking while stepping over the thin, brittle surface of a frozen lake. His clothes hang off of him in tatters, though his body has been long punished out of its weak shivering. If he moves at all– whether that’s self-inflicted struggling, trying to prop himself up with numb feet, starved of traction, or the short bouts of insuppressible tremors that drag the metal upwards along his jaw— the pain flares so badly he loses his sight to flickering bursts of white.
It can still get worse, of course. Even if he can endure the pain long enough to put up a fight, he’s not going to break the line it’s hung from, or untie it, or even free the hook from his skin. It’s going to rip his jaw off.
It’ll happen someday anyway, he knows. There’s only so long you can waterboard a man in his own blood before losing interest. The King will tire of this, the hook will rip his jaw from his face like wet cardboard and the rest of him will collapse to the ground, a puppet from cut strings. And while the blood is pooling around the flesh where his head has been cleaved apart, he will be asked if he’s ready to talk yet. And he will wheeze and gasp through the tatters of his lungs, wracked with shock, and shake his head no.
He’s punished for the slip in focus when one of his feet slides against the dirt, the hook pulls, and he feels something pop right next to his ear. He chokes again and feels blood spill over the edge of his lip, sliding cold down the side of his face. His eyes fill with tears, the only warm thing he’s felt in hours. There’s another hollow, horrible sound from the bone beneath his ear, and his heart clambers for shelter in the column of his throat as he feels something start to tear.
Awareness hits him like a freight train and he bolts awake, the inside of his mouth thick and coppery with the taste of cooling blood. Feeling floods back through his arms and he grabs clumsily, desperately at his jaw, fingers prying for the hook lodged through the underside of his face. His tongue pushes against his lower palette for that thin bud of metal that’d poked through the other side, sharp and ice-cold, but he can’t find it. Pain blooms fresh through his jaw and throat and he chokes on the feeling, hand cradled under his face turning in expectation of falling blood, but it- it isn’t there.
He’s shivering and drenched in sweat, his pulse a jackrabbit beneath the scarred skin of his throat. Leather peels from the nape of his neck when he sits forward, his fingers searching for the hard edge of the desk in front of him.
He’s in his office.
It’s dark, and the inside of Charlie’s throat is freezing cold when he draws in a breath, easily slipping into lungs that should be clotted and congealed with old blood. He’s alive, and more importantly, he’s awake.
Charlie reaches— Noel. The nameplate is on his desk, the copper glinting faintly as his eyes adjust to the darkness.
Noel reaches forward to pick up the closest mug, chipped and stained around the edges. To his relief there’s still coffee inside, ice cold and made with trembling, uncoordinated hands. Only the dregs are left; a half-evaporated, thick sludge that crawls its way down the inside of the mug like congealed blood. It’s slimy and bitter when it reaches Noel’s lips, a taste like acid on his tongue. Wincing, he swallows it back and clumsily sets down his mug.
He’s a kind of exhausted he’s all too familiar with, in which however tired he thinks he is, there is always more energy that can be sapped from him. It was the same way with pain, if he was honest. Whatever level of unfathomably agony ripped through his body with warped, serrated knives, there was always a crueler one he was going to face.
He was able to face. It’s already happened. He’s drowned and hanged and rotted for centuries in damp catacombs and on dark, ashy hills scattered with grey-petaled flowers that smelled of tin. He’s had his jaw torn off more times than he can count.
Blinking the grit from his eyes, he slides his sleeve up from his watch, trying to get his vision to focus on the hands. It’d be reasonable to go home, right about now. It’s late, but he’s sure he’d have at least a few hours there before he had to get back up and return to the office. He could get a change of clothes, gather up some notes he’d left behind, and feel marginally more human when he returned. It’s a nice thought.
His eyes try to sink themselves closed with exhaustion and he fights it, scrunching up his face in protest. He isn’t falling asleep again– not here and not at home.
He sits forward on his desk with his head in his hands, breathing thinly over the taste of repulsive coffee coating his mouth, barely enough to conceal the lingering taste of blood. He grits his teeth hard enough to send a dull, throbbing ache up the line of his jaw and into his skull, and tries to remember what lead he’d been following before he fell asleep.
His eyes glaze over staring at his notes, slanted handwriting he clearly wrote while actively falling asleep. There’s pen smudged along the outside of his right hand, and even if it was legible, he doesn’t think he’d be able to make sense of it. He’ll– he’ll retrace his steps. If he can—
He flinches when the phone beside him rings, startled only for a moment before his heart rate picks up again at the notion that someone could have a tip. The phone clatters when he picks it up, already reaching for a scrap piece of paper and a pen.
“This is Detective Noel Finley,” he says, voice rusty from sleep. He manages to keep the words from shaking, though. “Thanks for callin’, what can I do for you?”
He hears a heavy sigh, breath that crackles faintly through the receiver. “Go home, detective.”
Disappointment washes over Noel, cold and leaden, and he slumps back in his chair. He tips his head backwards against the headrest, swallowing over the lump in his throat as he swears under his breath.
“C’mon. I got work to do, Jones.”
“It’s three in the mornin’. There’s always gonna be work to do.”
“It’s– I’m…”
He inhales too sharply and becomes abruptly aware of the way he’s sitting, with the coil of the phone cord pulled taught near the side of his face, his head tilted backward. He tastes bile in the back of his throat, suppressing the shake of his voice when he sits forward again.
“It’s important stuff. I’m makin’ progress, I swear.”
“Yeah? Or are you drinking in your office poring over a load of notes you no longer understand, hoping one will suddenly have the Butcher’s signed confession on it?”
Noel shakes his head, sighing. “It’s a trail. He’s taking me somewhere.”
“I don’t think he is, Detective. And even if you’re right, ‘taking’ is the wrong word. He’s luring you somewhere.”
“A lure’s a lead. I don’t have to take the bait to find out who’s holding the rod.”
“He’ll outsmart you.”
“I’ll see his face.”
“Are you our only guy smart enough to catch him, or the only one desperate enough to think he can?”
“I’m not compromised, Jones. I’ll find the guy and have him in cuffs if it kills me.”
“I’d prefer you live long enough to fail.”
Noel laughs hoarsely, the sound scraping the back of his throat. It feels like his lungs are stuffed with iron wool, wearing down the softness of his insides with each weary breath. That’s something he’s grown hopelessly aware of since returning– how soft everything is underneath his skin. Even his bones he’s seen the innards of, porous and spongy when they’re broken open, hollow as a bird’s. Even starved far past what should have been death, his sunken stomach was tender with the barest swell of organs, fresh fruit ripe with blood. He remembers how it felt when they were torn from him, the slickness of gore sliding down his front and dripping to his feet.
Jones doesn’t sound as if he’s found the same humor in the idea. “You hear what I’m saying, don’t you?”
Noel scrubs his free hand over his face. “Yeah.”
“This isn’t an ‘if it kills you’ situation. Keep this shit up, and it won’t be a question. It’s gonna kill you.”
“I’ll settle down after the case, alright? Rest on my laurels for a little bit, call it belated medical leave.”
“Cause you wouldn’t take it when you started bleedin’ out at the station.”
Noel bristles at the reference, doing his best not to remember that particular… incident. It was his fault. He’d gotten too sloppy with one of his stitches, too loose with the bandages, and for weeks his head had been foggy and stupid with painkillers. All that culminated in one unfortunate day when a wound had reopened at work, and he’d bled for half an hour from a gash in his side before fainting from blood loss at the station. By the time he came to, a dozen people had seen what happened, all given airtight evidence that Detective Noel Finley had returned to the job a miserable, incapable wreck.
There’s really no reason to be bringing it up.
“Hey,” Noel says, voice rough. “I don’t got the patience to talk about that.”
“That’s what I mean. You’re fine to work on the toughest case we’ve got, though? I can wind you up, but the Butcher won’t?”
“I’m capable of keeping my life and the case separate.”
“But you treat the case like your life depends on it,” he hears Jones sigh, exasperation in his voice. “What’s in this for you, Finley? What are you trying to prove?”
Noel hangs up.
The office is blissfully, painfully silent after the phone clicks, and he wipes his sweat-slick hand off on his shirt, grimy with the feeling of the phone receiver. Then he slumps forward to brace his elbows against the desk and presses his face into his hands. He closes heavy eyes and lets a wave of raw, desperate exhaustion wash over him, his own mind pleading with him to rest. It’s a mind that doesn’t know what it’s asking for, and won’t quiet down either way.
He just needs to solve the fucking case. It’s all he has. He needs to focus on his work, find where the Butcher is next going to strike, and head him off at the pass. So long as the catch is clean and no one but Noel gets hurt, it won’t matter that he’s been actively destroying himself to get here. It’ll wash all of this away.
The paper isn’t going to read ‘after many long weeks of searching, NYC detective and total fucking mess Noel Finley was able to corner the culprit and take him into custody.” Even if it did, he still would have done something. He’ll have shaken off the cobwebs of all that happened to him, at last more detective than fleshly, infuriating moral thing–
He’ll have moved from surviving back to accomplishing, freeing himself from the painfully static existence that’s been piling up around him. At the minute, he does his work and he stays alive and he doesn’t try to kill himself now that he’d be able to, and he acts like it’s anything of achievement. He may as well have a foot still stuck in the Dreamlands.
But not now that he’s on the case. His reward will no longer be another day he has to grit his teeth through, he has a prize. Not only that, a prize he’ll be able to visit in a jail cell, get a firm handshake from his acquaintances for, and hold as proof that he has emerged, at last, from the darkness and readjusted his eyes to the light.
The problem being, of course, that the Butcher is a formidable prize for a reason. He’s a vicious, clever bastard, who covers all his tracks and chooses his victims arbitrarily and remains a comfortable twelve steps ahead of any investigator at any given time.
He doesn’t kill for sheer sadistic entertainment, nor does he hesitate. Every choice to end a life is a calm, well-rounded thing, and even in cases of raw impulse he is dead certain of his decision. Noel’s been at this for months, and he doesn’t even have a concrete physical description.
The phone rings again.
Noel groans against his hands, leans over, and takes the receiver.
“This is Detective Noel Finley.”
“I got a three-year old at home for these kinda hijinks, Detective.”
“I’ll say it again.” Noel closes his eyes. “There’s work to do.”
“You’re gonna drive yourself crazy. You know that, right? There’s gonna be a breaking point, and it’s gonna happen when you’re doing something important.”
Noel has reached so many breaking points in the most recent chapter of his life that he’s stopped thinking of them as breaking points and more like a long line of dominoes. He’s scraped his sanity back together with his fingernails and clung to it as tightly as he could, only to lose his grip again the day after. He’s been nothing but madness, packed like wet clay around the one stable core of you will not give in. He’s been every kind of mad, and it isn’t as if he’s stable these days, either. Most men don’t wake trying to claw the meathooks out from under their skin. He sighs against the phone, reaching for his coffee cup, and remembers it’s empty.
“You say that like there's a good time for a breakin’ point,” he mutters, setting the mug down.
“There are better and worse times. And I don’t wanna see you get a bullet in the side of the head cause you picked the worse one.”
It’s bizarre to think of a bullet as capable of killing him, after everything. Not even in the sense that he deserves better– it’d just be sad, for a tiny metal thing the size of a cherry pit to be what takes him out. He’s had his head removed one sinew at a time.
He fails to suppress a soft, shallow laugh at the idea, and he can practically hear Jones grimacing.
“You told me you don’t got a wife, Detective.”
He sobers, pushing his mug away with his fingers. “No. Never had one.”
“You know your neighbors? Got a, a roommate?”
Noel chuckles. “No.”
“Any family? Distant or otherwise?”
“Nope.”
“Anyone?”
Noel sighs, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. His fingers are cold and it doesn’t help the pulsing ache in his skull, but he can feel it, at least. “I got the case.”
“The case isn’t gonna care if you die, Finley. You want the case ‘cause you love it, and it wants you back so it can learn what your blood tastes like. That kinda fling doesn’t tend to go down well.”
“It’s not like that,” Noel says, deftly leaving out the part where it is like that, actually. He’d be willing to bleed for his prize— God knows he has already.
“You know why I’m worried, Finley.” Jones’ voice has softened, gravelly with exhaustion and pity. It’s late for him too, Noel remembers. “It’s about bad luck and where you were standing and whether the blade catches your lung, all that matters, yeah. But at the end of the day, it’s guys like you that get killed.”
Jones has a point. He usually does. It should scare him, to be told he’s the exact kind of man who tends to wind up dead on a case they couldn’t let go of. His vision is smeared as he looks down at the desk in front of him, trying to let the words sink in. But he’s built in a knee-jerk instinct to the thought, an immediate, reflexive, this isn’t going to kill you. It was one of the most important things he had with him, in the Dreamlands. He would have given up otherwise. He should probably break the habit, given he’s pretty sure he’s mortal now, back in the waking world. It’s not as if he has any proof, though; he hasn’t died yet.
“I know that.”
“And I’ve told you before, I don’t wanna see you die before I do, alright?”
It’s a lofty request. Jones is a careful, smart man with a lot to live for.
“You’re askin’ a lot of me, Jones.”
“I’m asking you to go home.”
Noel grimaces silently to himself in his office, reaching forward to turn his coffee cup around in his hand. It’s ice cold against his palm, but he can convince himself of a ghost of warmth, still lingering in the ceramic.
He shuts his eyes. “‘Kay.”
“Good kid. I’ll see you tomorrow, alright?”
“Right.”
Jones hangs up, and Noel sets the receiver on the desk in front of him. He stares at it a moment, briefly considering just… staying. He’s worse things than a liar, after all.
But he’s awfully tired, and he’s been at an impasse in his work for a couple days now, trying to link in a more recent murder he’s not even sure was the Butcher. It’s been nothing short of exhausting.
So he winces as he gets up from his desk, dormant aches stirring between every joint, and pulls his coat from the back of his chair. Before leaving, he just barely remembers to set the receiver back in its cradle.
Noel’s home is cold. He’s been meaning to get around to fixing the boiler, but he spends so much time at the office that it hardly seems worth his while. Not only that, it’s going to warm up outside at some point soon, and it’s time better spent working on his caseload. He wears his coat inside most of the time and shivers terribly at night, but the cold isn’t what keeps him up.
The hot water still tends to work okay, except tonight, apparently. When he comes home and runs himself a bath, the water never heats past lukewarm, not enough to get any steam in the room. A shame. He’s had worse. His clothes are still damp with sweat from the nightmare at the office, and his hands tremble finely when he tries to undo the buttons of his shirt. His nails are dry and broken, thin lines of grime stuck beneath them, and he doesn’t look at himself in the mirror when he pulls off his shirtsleeves.
As he leaves his clothes in a heap on the floor they feel awfully heavy in his arms, a full human body’s worth of seams and pockets. These days they’re his shield, more so than the thick walls of the station or the great intangible barrier between waking and dreaming worlds. They fill in the gaps where pieces of him have been punched in or torn out, like plaster smeared over holes in the drywall. Enough cloth pads his ribs and no one can see through to the garishly thin trellis of bone, his collar high enough and the ragged scar ringing his throat disappears.
Some days, his badge feels as if it carries half his weight.
He settles into the bath and tries not to hiss as new and old wounds sting in the water, muscles pulling taught in protest. He shivers as his body struggles to adjust, as if it, too, is upset that he no longer can find the comfort in it that he used to.
It used to be straightforward enough– if he did good work that day, Roland would tell him so, and he’d do the same for Roland. They’d lock up together and part ways only if they weren’t getting drinks afterward. Noel would leave the office for the shelter of a warm and well-lit home, and the shape of his skin was familiar when he pulled up his shirt to expose it. He’d let his thoughts float off, unmoored, because the waters of his mind were not so treacherous back then. Because he’d done good work.
It’s a grueling, tedious thing now, as tiring as sitting at his desk and with fewer things to look at. He draws his legs to his chest and lays his head down, cheek pressing against the top of his knees. He inhales, and the room around him feels colossal.
It takes a long while for the shivering to subside.
Finally, he shifts slightly in the water, spine clicking when he leans forward to take the bar of soap from the side of the bathtub. Begrudging dread has settled over him, but if he just sits here until his skin softens he’ll still feel dirty afterward, and all of this will have been for nothing.
That doesn’t change the fact that actually trying to clean himself off feels like trying to clean wide handfuls of sticks and leaves from dry underbrush. He feels brittle and grimy, crawling with many-legged memories, each graze of his fingers akin to the sensation of touching wet food in the bottom of the kitchen sink. Wet skin slides over the ridges of his hands, pulling over his knuckles when he flexes them, rainslick tarp on scaffolding. His own touch revolts him.
He’s shaking again by the time he sets the soap down, much to his frustration– mocked for his attempts to settle his nerves. His breathing’s fallen out of rhythm, unevenly rocking like shallow water in his chest, but at least it’s over. He lets himself fall still, watching the soapsuds cling to the edge of the bathtub around him, hugging his knees where they protrude above the water.
It’s much easier not to move, let the water lap up against his sides like waves against a boat run aground. He thinks his ribs the rotting wooden framing of the hull, his body a shipwreck. If he closes his eyes and breathes deeply, he can almost smell salt.
He turns over Jones’ words in his mind, cleaning the memory of static away from them. He’d been terribly aware of how silent his home was when he returned, no roommates, no spouse, no kids. Just crumpled maps and pins and scraps of paper scattering every surface, the cluttered embrace of the case that wants him back. Even now, he can see fingerprints on the mirror, notes and reminders he’d scribbled in the condensation the last time the water was hot enough to fog the glass.
Even as his head grows heavier and the feeling of the water around him starts to grow more bearable, he doesn’t let himself doze off. It’s not a safe place, and he’s well-practiced in detouring around drowsiness. Instead he drifts, skin slowly soaking through in the bathwater, and he tips his head forward so his chin rests against his chest, water level at his lower lip. It hurts the back of his neck and his molars grate together in the back of his mouth, but it makes it harder to forget that his jaw is still attached.
His thoughts break apart gradually, driftwood-pieces bumping up against one another in his mind. He hears static in the gentle sound of water around him, sees the interlacing streets of New York when his eyes sink shut. He thinks of his work, of the case. He thinks of rough lips sour with poison, warm and insistent against his own. Sharp teeth break the skin, searching for the taste of blood, and Noel lets them take it from him, heavy and compliant with exhaustion. A tongue, thick, laves over the cut and coaxes more from the wound, drowning him deep in a blood-slick kiss. He parts his lips; accepts his prize.
His eyes flutter open and he blinks hazily at the tile wall, inhaling deeply and shifting in the water. His jaw hurts, and a familiar bone-deep exhaustion makes itself known once again in his frame. Christ. All those eternities of meathooks and knives whittled from his own ribs, all to be subject to this newer, softer kind of torture.
And this time, he’d do anything.
“Hey, hey, alright. This is good, but we’re gonna be careful about this, ‘kay?”
“No time,” Noel responds, pinning the receiver to his ear as he searches his desk for his watch. He’d taken it off at some point, the scraping of it against his papers was driving him up the wall, and now he can’t find it. “He’s gonna be there tonight, Jones, and if I’m late I don’t get the feeling he’s gonna wait for me.”
“Don’t be stupid about this. I trust that you’re right, and he’s gonna be there, and that’s exactly why we ought to get you some backup.”
“I need to get there first,” he mutters, still shuffling through the clutter on his desk, weeks’ worth of records and police reports and cold cups of coffee, to no avail. He curses the fact that he couldn’t have found this out yesterday, when he would’ve had more time to mull this over, make preparations, maybe even arrange for that backup. There isn’t time, now.
“Where’s he gonna be?”
“The, uh- the packing plant. Few miles north of that place you caught Rosenbloom a couple months ago, you know the one.”
There’s a stunned pause over the phone, and Noel stacks two of his mugs on top of one another with a muted clink , gritting his teeth as he tries to find that damn watch–
“Detective, that’s three, four hour’s drive,” Jones says.
“Yep. The bastard’s making me work for it, which is why I’m leaving now.”
“What about–”
“Forget it, alright? I don’t need backup.”
“To catch the Butcher ?”
“I gotta go, Jones. See you at the precinct.”
“Hey– Finley! Noel, don’t you dare fucking–”
The receiver rattles in its cradle when he hangs up, and he abandons the search for his watch with a huff of annoyance. He grabs his gun from the drawer instead and fits it into his shoulder holster. After every night he’s spent leaving the office in a haggard, sleep deprived haze, fumbling for the lights as he drags himself back home, the urgency is almost surreal. The phone rings again and he stomps down the instinct to reach for it. He takes his coat from the back of his chair, the crushed box of cigarettes from his desk, and hurries out of the office.
It’s dark by the time Noel arrives at the plant. The sun was setting while he drove, dragging long shadows out over the road in front of him before they were swallowed up by his headlights. His thoughts paced and tangled in his head for the first hour, before finally setting into a predictable–if equally maddening–rhythm of holy shit, Noel, you’re gonna catch him, then not if you don’t start driving faster, you won’t, then should’ve accepted that backup. Finally, the road turns to gravel under his tires, crunching beneath the weight of the car, and he rolls to a stop outside the plant. He’s been glancing at the dash chronograph practically between every turn, but it’s still an overwhelming relief to find that he’s right on time.
When he gets out of the car his heart’s beating so hard that he can feel his pulse in his throat, and he’s sure if he lit a cigarette for his nerves he’d start feeling sick.
He shoves the key in his pocket of his coat and shuts the door behind him, the sound rattling across the dark, empty street. There’s little to find here, just gravel lots and mostly-abandoned buildings. The roads are lit by mostly moonlight, a few sickly streetlights flickering weakly beneath the silhouettes of moths.
And when Noel slips around the side entrance to the plant, finding a door that isn’t rusted all the way shut, he feels– alive. It’s somewhere between the breathless thrill of a hunt and the terror of being hunted, all dependent on razor-sharp focus. This isn’t the cold mundanity of a day that will end with him still breathing, slumped over a desk and dragged over into the following morning, nor is it the hopelessness of eternal, unchanging torture. This is hope, bright and burning in his chest, the risk he’s been waiting for.
The door squeals thinly when he pulls it open, just enough for him to fit through, and it’s pitch-dark inside. He pauses, still close by the shelter of the door, to listen— he doesn’t hear breathing, even when he holds his own and turns out the faint sounds from outside. So, cautiously, he reaches around the door frame and feels around for some kind of switch. His fingers find a breaker on the wall, the box set inward, and he winces at having to pick one at random. There’s a thin click of the switch and a bulb of light belatedly, weakly flickers to life above him. The light buzzes in faint protest, as if irritated by the awakening.
The room he’s found his way into is narrow and cold, the ceiling low and the walls grimy. Rust peels from the door frame like paint. There’s an engraving on the metal plate by the door, the letters obscured with dust stuck to thick black machined oil. He cuts his hand on the serrated edge of the plate when he tries to clear it off, skin sliced open on messily routed metal.
“Fuck–” he draws his hand back, grimacing at the blood beading from the cut before looking back up at the sign. With the streak he did clear away and the light falling at the right angle, he can make out the word tripery. The general feeling of grease in the room makes a little bit more sense.
There’s a door on the other side, leading deeper into the building, and thankfully the door doesn’t look to be rusted shut. There’s a metal pull handle that’s slimy against his hand when he tugs on it, rounded and attached to the door at two points, and it opens with a faint squeak into the next hall.
He doesn’t turn on any more lights past that first room. He uses his lighter when he needs it, but the next few rooms have big enough windows to allow for an ashy sheet of moonlight, illuminating the skeletons of twisted, greasy pieces of machinery.
He’s just stepped into another long hallway when he hears something.
He thinks, at first, that it’s the squealing of a rusted hinge, but it’s a softer, more pleasant sound than that. Noel takes a slow, silent step forward, listening closely– and it changes pitch, slipping neatly downwards to settle a few notes lower, before lifting to a higher note again.
His breath catches in his chest. Someone’s whistling .
He’s sure of it, it’s slow and calm and far too sweet a sound for the cold, oily interior of the plant. It’s faint, but if he focuses enough he thinks he can hear that it’s accompanied by footsteps, much further into the building and growing more distant.
If it’s the Butcher, it means that he knows Noel is here, and he’s calling out, a siren singing from somewhere deep within the corpse of a packing plant. Meaning, then, that Noel doesn’t need to hide. Just follow.
He’s careful anyway. From what he can figure out, the Butcher’s always worked alone, but it could be a stranger whistling, and the man he’s looking for is standing across the room from him, shrouded in shadow, wire coiled between his hands. He hugs the wall so tightly he feels rust scraping along the planes of his shoulders through his coat, watching every shadow. It hits him that he doesn’t even know who he’s looking for— and finds that he’s less horrified by how little he really knows about the case, and more enraptured by the idea of finally meeting the Butcher face-to-face.
He keeps looking, and the whistling moves, drawing away from him at just a slightly slower pace than he’s moving. Whoever it is, he’s gaining on them.
The sound is at most one or two rooms away when he reaches a thicker, heavier metal door. It’s smeared with fingerprints, and looks like one to an old industrial freezer, cold and menacing.
…In the short period of time Noel was given to read up on the plant, scraps of definitive information were few and far between. The place’s certifications were questionable at best and at worst, nowhere to be found, so without actually scouting it out it was difficult to tell what kind of operations they hosted. In short, his guess was somewhat close.
This isn’t a packing plant, exactly. It’s a slaughterhouse.
Noel, of course, does not have the wherewithal to realise this until he finds that beyond the metal door is a long, dark room with rusted metal tracks built into a low ceiling.
And suspended in close, even intervals along the tracks, casting barbed shadows on the walls in the light from the door, are dozens—maybe hundreds—of thick, cruel-looking meathooks. Some are grimy and flaking with rust, others are missing the hook themselves, just a broken and corroded chain hanging loose from the ceiling. They form an ugly, low-hanging thicket that smells of rust, old blood, and automated death.
It’s dark enough that the room stretches out into a seemingly infinite abyss, and his thoughts buzz in place when he hears the scraping of the door slowly shutting behind him. The mangled shadows of the hooks slide and warp as more light is cut off from him, and he distantly thinks that if he tried to step back, he wouldn’t be able to move. He doesn’t dare test it.
He holds very still, all his functions on standby as his mind fights to get a grip on what he’s seeing. Awaiting further orders.
His thoughts, at some point, have lost momentum and rolled to a stop, so he forces himself to reassess where he is, steps at a time. He is in a massive, metal room that is dark as pitch and filled wall-to-wall with meathooks. It smells faintly of formaldehyde and old, old rot, and he is standing in, in some part of it. Based on the distance from the entrance and the- cleanliness of the room, he can only guess that it’s a station by which the livestock would be long dead.
He realises that at some point the whistling stopped. That doesn’t seem right, but then again, the inside of his head feels as if it’s been stuffed with cotton, so maybe it’s just been muffled into silence. Maybe it wasn’t there to begin with.
The notion makes something very deep inside of him feel very cold. He blinks hard, trying to figure out if his eyes are open or not, but either way he sees bent, sharp shapes behind his eyelids. Metal figures hang in his vision either way, so his point of reference will have to be himself.
He tries to reach for the side of his face just to remember where his jaw rests, so he can feel where the flesh meets his palm, the bone pressing its way into the space between his hand and upper row of teeth in protest that yes, it is still there.
He can’t move his hand. It stays by his side, as though the thread that connects his mind to the muscle has been neatly cut, a puppet in want of strings.
That doesn’t mean– it’s fine, that doesn’t mean anything. He’s dealt with sleep paralysis before, seeing hooks where they weren’t while completely unable to move. At least this time he’s standing up, so he tries to focus on the feeling of being planted to the ground, even if his feet won’t move either. They’re cold, and numbness pools in the bottom of his shoes. If they are pressed flat against the ground or just barely holding him up on his toes he would not know— nor does he know if the quickness of his breathing is apropos of any real thing to be feared. Either he is made coward by his conscience, or it is his lungs desperately sampling the air for blood or rot or traces of tin.
The voice in his head sounds a little like Roland, a little like Jones, a lot like something that has the choice of many, many mouths to speak through.
Are you sure, Charlie, that you’re awake?
It occurs to him that maybe the barrier between the waking and dreaming world is not so vast and intangible as he’s come to interpret it. Maybe it is as simple and solid as a thick, cold, metal door.
Two options, then; this is real, or it isn’t. At least it’s the luxury of a binary, as opposed to a thick, murky pool of suspects, with every possibility of blackmail, collaboration or coercion in the in-between. He is either awake, or he is dreaming.
He should probably settle for the latter, so it’ll be a pleasant surprise if this is real, as opposed to a mortifying disappointment when it isn’t.
…He’s always been good at confirming his own hypotheses, of course. If his hypotheses weren’t right as often as they were, it’d be more obvious how much of his judgement is really just self-serving bias.
He’s spiralling. He knows the feeling of it, the way the inside of his head starts to sound. He’s made sense of it, too, it’s his mind cutting all the fat from his thoughts so it's just the- the meat , speared on the sharp, unyielding hook of simple logic, railroaded on a steel track towards an answer. He can carve open every word that enters his head and slice out the fallacies, methodically discard it if the voice doesn’t sound like his own.
It makes it harder for him to tell when he’s doing it, though, because everything very quickly takes on the crystalline appearance of making perfect sense. His thoughts don’t roam, they are on one track. But the fallacy in that—he can see it now—is that it makes the assumption that he was on the right track to begin with, and that continuing forward on it will always be the most helpful path. Consequently he is placed in a situation in which he is locked in place, and there is a non-negligible possibility that it is the wrong place.
The only way to fix that, of course, is for him to calm down. Once his head isn’t on lockdown and the flashing lights have turned off, he can make sure the track is the right one, refocus, and move forward.
How the hell is he meant to calm down, though, when there’s a piece of metal stuck through the underside of his jaw? Is he supposed to breathe deeply through and past the blood pooling in his throat, let it slip into his lungs where it’ll be out of the way?
At this point, he thinks, as the shadows reappear in the light of an opening door behind him, he misses the beheading.
Something cool, thin and sharp slithers across the front of his neck, grating finely into the delicate skin of his throat, and it takes him a fraction of a second too long to realize there’s somebody standing behind him.