Chapter Text
Travis is a quick shot, although he doesn’t pride himself on it; most of his skill comes from not being quick enough.
He has plenty of time tonight and more than enough space to maneuver. Having waited deep in the forest for the White Wolf’s howl to rise above the treetops, Travis approaches its underground lair from the north and shoots the monster twice the moment its moon-pale form comes into view, chunks of soil sliding off its sinewy back.
What he learned the very first night it appeared out of the well is that if you’re quick enough with the rifle action, the White Wolf will flee rather than try and tear you to pieces. You always shoot it twice.
Like a good boy, it dashes south-east with Travis blinking through the trees close behind, occasionally firing to the right and left of the monster to keep it on course. It is exhilarating, the hunt. Compared to the heavy obligation of placing a preserved heart on the ritual stone, to have his blood pumping and know he didn’t have to kill anybody for it is a blessing on par with making love to Laura.
She must see them from her hiding spot when they reach the clearing. But Laura wouldn’t be the only one watching.
The Hackett House looms over the sea of roots like a colossal tree stump, black against the backdrop of the starry sky and rotten to the core. Travis can sense his mother’s smug satisfaction as soon as he breaks the tree line—in her unwavering self-assurance, Constance would attribute Travis’s sudden appearance to him fulfilling his filial duty where Bobby has so clearly failed.
No one’s heart was left on the stone tonight, so it would only be natural for Travis to pick up a gun and keep the White Wolf on the run until the moon sets and it begrudgingly returns to its lair.
…He sends the monster hurtling straight toward the house, shooting at the ground closer and closer to where its claws are tearing through the well growth. Having nowhere else to go with a whole section of the first floor in front of it overtaken by the dead roots, it leaps up, shattering the second floor window his mother was looking out of a minute ago. Travis doesn’t pause to relish in the ensuing pandemonium.
He saw it break his father’s neck, yet by the time he gathers his brothers behind him and they make their way to the basement, Jedediah is already there, caught up in futile attempts to bring Constance’s corpse back to life.
Whatever miracle has kept Jed’s soul inside his body, one glance is enough to tell his wife is not going to be awarded the same grace. Her head resembles an over-ripe pumpkin that has caved in in the middle, teeth gleaming in the light of a gas lantern like a smattering of seeds.
Palms slick with sweat, the wooden butt of the Springfield rifle is jumping against Travis’s shoulder. Chris falls to his knees next to him, barfing, and he has to swallow the urge to follow suit as a sickly-sweet earthy stench seeps down his throat along with the scent of spilled rum from smashed casks.
Travis is so consumed by the terrible red cavity in place of his mother’s face, he barely notices his surroundings, and it takes him too long to realize that Bobby’s scared keening is turning into cries of pain. His little brother’s eyes are like glowing amber when Travis finally looks at him. Staggering away in horror, he falls and drops the rifle, and then the curse overtakes him, too, crumpling his spasming body in its sticky fist.
The last thing he remembers from that night is his faceless mother sitting up.
He didn’t see the sacrificed boy or the woman Constance killed. Travis didn’t even know they existed—he never paid enough attention to his mother’s charity to know who exactly reaped its grim benefits. He wonders if there were others.
As he jumps in the well, Travis hears Jed’s ancient Colt go off—once, likely becoming jammed. The cacophony above intensifies.
Shaking off his jacket and the rifle, he gets to work. It isn’t hard finding the bones; thin grass-like roots cling to them, but rather than try to untangle the skeleton, Travis rips the well growth out of the ground. When the boy’s remains are free, he wraps them in his jacket and briefly leans against the wall of the well. His vision blurs.
While weaker in the colder months, the pervasive odor of the sap has caught up with him. Travis gags and shakes his head like a dog. He was hoping to blink right out of the well, but there’s no way he’ll be able to stick the landing after inhaling so much of its rancid breath. Cradling the jacket in one arm, Travis begins to climb.
Something feels off almost immediately. Unable to put his finger on what that is, Travis wills himself to keep going—he has to get out while there’s still time, and whatever it is that’s bothering him can be dealt with when he’s not risking cracking his skull open in a fall.
It dawns on him too late that it’s too quiet. He crawls out of the well, and the barrel of Jed’s gun touches his temple.
Constance is the one holding it.
*
The house is too quiet.
A chilly blast sweeps over the top of the hill, and Laura breathes on her reddened fingers, not taking her eyes off the windows. Crammed into a dry hollow at the base of an elm tree, she watches for any sign of movement on the second floor, but it’s like the beast that was ripping through the building a minute ago has suddenly disappeared. She’d think it escaped back into the woods, but Laura didn’t see it run across the property. Its skin shines under moonlight, impossible to miss when on the move.
It has to still be in the house.
She anxiously scratches at her blood-smeared face and reaches for the radio lying next to her on the ground. But as she brings the mouthpiece up to her lips, tiny black bugs begin to pour out of the speaker and under the cuff of her sleeve. Laura screams, dropping the mouthpiece, and at the same moment, a hand reaches into the hollow and grabs her by the ponytail.
“Found ya.”
An old man drags her into the open. He seems frail, neck crooked and irises very light, but his grip is unyielding despite her clawing at his wrist. After a short struggle, Travis’s father pulls Laura to her feet and pushes her toward the house.
“Start walkin’, girlie. Don’t make me slap that pretty face of yours.”
Laura bares her teeth, but there’s not much she can do besides craning her neck to look at the old man. Weirdly, he’s shielding his eyes with his free hand as if the moon’s silvery glow is too bright for him.
“Is that how you treat your future daughter-in-law?” Laura spits out.
“That right?” Jed Hackett doesn’t sound all that impressed but still hesitates for a second, searching her face with his translucent eyes—and not paying attention to her hands.
Sliding her phone out of her pocket, Laura turns on the flashlight.
The old man yelps in pain and lets go of her, and she doesn’t wait around to see what the light has done to him. Laura runs. She’s not gonna leave Travis, but she has to be free to get him out of whatever trouble he’s in.
However, as Laura sprints around the nearest corner of the house, another pair of hands catches her from behind.
“No!” she shrieks, blindly kicking back. The kick lands, and the man holding her grunts, but much like Jed before him, he’s not someone she can fight off physically.
“Hello, Laura. It’s good to see you again.” Chris Hackett spins her around, clasping her elbows, and for a moment Laura is transported to the morning in May when he showed up at her door at the Harbinger.
Hello, Laura. It’s nice to finally meet you.
His gaze was as cold and hard then as it is now, totally at odds with his unassuming appearance. For fuck’s sake, Chris Hackett looks like a dad, missing only plastic sunglasses and a fanny pack.
She fears he’s going to kill her this time.
Jed rounds the corner as well, fresh blisters all over his face, and Chris nods at him.
“Hey there, Pa. Basement?”
“Yes. Your mother said to bring the bitch there,” the old man growls. He snatches the phone out of Laura’s hand when he approaches and crushes it under his heel.
Together, the two men lead her to a side door foaming with fungi and down a set of stone steps. Jed stays in the shadows, taking out a cigarette, while Chris moves farther in with Laura in front of him.
She sees Travis first, lying on the floor in a circle of gas light. Bulking over him like a hellish guard dog is the pale monster. Up close, it strikes her how similar its form is to how Travis was when she found him in the jail cell.
Once upon a time, this beast, too, was just a man.
Travis tenses up when he hears them but doesn’t dare move; the monster’s jaws are hovering in the dangerous proximity of his throat.
Chris whistles. “Holy— How’d you do that, Ma?”
Only then does Laura notice the elderly woman standing by the crater of broken floor boards. She’s looking pensively into the chasm Laura herself has looked into so many times in her dreams.
Constance Hackett turns her head and sends her middle son a coy smile:
“Well, I always thought Lilian Grant might come in handy one day, so I snatched her heart from the casket.” She chuckles, “Had to get my hands dirty, but I’m no gentle flower, am I? The heart alone ain’t as good as the full ritual, but it’ll keep him in line.”
Laura is not sure if she means the monster or Travis. Constance’s dark eyes find her, then, and the woman scoffs, jerking her chin in Laura’s direction, “Just like I suspected, a city hussie!”
“Says a Venus fly trap,” Laura mutters, loud enough for the woman to hear, and Constance looks her over anew.
“Got a mouth on you, I see.”
With the come-hither gesture from his mother, Chris guides Laura forth, too close to the edge of the well for comfort. Travis makes a panicked sound when they pass him, quickly drowned out by Laura’s own heartbeat. It feels like the well is watching her hungrily, ready to suck her in like the black hole that it is. Roots are crawling up its walls before her eyes, too quick and agile to be anything but alive.
“It needs human bones to stay open, y’know? This sorta… wedge in the door,” Constance tells Laura candidly, following her gaze. Then she looks to their feet and kicks a vertebrae out a searching root’s path. “Little Silas has been down there for long enough, and my oldest here needs a lesson taught.”
As her intentions become clear, a few things happen at once. Travis punches the pale monster beneath the jaw, making its teeth clack together and sinking his own—longer and sharper than a minute ago—into its vulnerable jugular. Bright arterial blood sprays all over the debris strewn across the floor, sending the roots into a frenzy. Constance snaps her head toward them in a rocking, snake-like motion, and Chris Hackett pulls the knife out of the sheath hidden beneath the hem of Laura’s jacket and plunges it into his mother’s stomach.
Constance gasps.
“What is this now, Christopher?!” she exclaims, sounding, of all things, disapproving, as if a child cussed in her presence. Then the sides of her face part, revealing the wet, fleshy maw and how utterly inhuman Constance truly is.
“Venus fly trap” was an understatement.
“What is this, Christopher?!” the creature bellows in the otherworldly, echoey voice, bloody spit flying in their faces.
“Dude, let me go!” Laura screams, and Chris finally does, throwing her to the side as Constance lunges forward.
Landing on her elbows and knees, she scrambles to get away from the two. Glancing back, the man is looking at his mother with raw, unmasked hatred, one hand wrist-deep in the maw, knife in the other.
“Okay,” Laura pants, “okay, fuck you both.”
She has to help Travis, and the rest of them may swallow each other for all she cares.
The pale monster has already shaken him off. The neck wound is visibly slowing it down, torso glistening with red, yet Travis’s attempt to roll from under it is met with the pale’s canines in his shoulder. Travis cries out.
He wasn’t joking about the thing being unkillable, but can the same be said about him? He’s warding off the monster’s claws, but at any moment, it could gut Travis like a fish.
Laura looks around wildly in search of a weapon, and her gaze falls on the police rifle lying forgotten among the rotting boards that surround the well. She rushes after it, dodging the writhing roots and nearly colliding with the old man running toward his wife and son.
Jumping right over the crater in a bid to save a few seconds, that sucking sensation pulls on her insides again—her legs wobble when her feet touch the floor, but she avoids falling in, spinning and heavily coming down on one knee. Her palms end up full of splinters, and Laura hauls the gun up with a hiss of pain. It seemed way lighter when Travis was the one handling it.
Nevertheless, Laura takes aim—in, out, hold, just like at a carnival shooting range—and hits the monster’s upper body near its exposed armpit. It drops Travis with a furious animalistic roar and immediately turns its attention to Laura, nostrils flaring and blood boiling around the entry wound.
She sees the monster’s muscles coil as it prepares to leap at her and hears Travis’s hoarse yell as he struggles to rise off the floor, face white as a sheet.
“Again! Goddamnit, Laura, shoot it again!”
So she tries. The rifle responds with a metallic click. The magazine is empty.
Laura’s mouth opens, but no sound comes out, and Travis screams her name. The monster attacks—but instead of mowing her down, it hits its protruding ribs on the edge of the well, impaled from below on a thick, sharp root.
The claws dig into the ground inches away from Laura, but even as it growls, pink foam dripping from its teeth, the red eyes become dull. The root, more like a tendril now, wraps around the monstrous body several times and drags it into the darkness of the well.
Laura meets Travis’s bewildered stare from across the basement, and then an echoey cry of fear makes both of them turn their heads.
Tendrils are coiling around Constance’s ankles, steadily climbing higher. Her face is back to normal, wide-eyed, the scalp bare; she’s clinging to Jed so tightly her knuckles have turned white. Her husband doesn’t try to free himself from her embrace, and when the tendrils bind them together, it is already too late.
The door is closing, taking with it everything that belongs on the other side.
“Travis!!!” Constance screeches, “Travis!!!”
But when Laura’s eyes snap to him again, he’s dragging the unconscious Chris away from the chasm. He doesn’t even lift his head this time. Travis has only one good arm, so she dashes around the well to help him, no longer looking at his parents either.
Constance demands, then pleads, then screams, and then it all goes quiet at once.
There’s nothing and no one but a circle of black earth in place of the well, and only in the far corner of the basement, Eliza’s patterned skirt is peeking through the shadows, a child’s skull laid in her lap.
*
Chris comes to after they bring him outside, and for a while the three of them sit leaning against the wall of the house. The brothers speak in quiet voices, and every now and again, Travis squeezes Laura’s hand.
“What are you gonna do now?” he asks when Chris stands up and stretches.
“Find Bobby. Then… burn that fucking journal Ma got this nightmare from. Along with the house—if you don’t mind, that is.”
“Why would I?”
“Well, it’s yours now.”
Seeing Travis’s struck expression, Chris raises an eyebrow. “What, you didn’t know? Both of their wills were straight out of Septimus’s times, and they never changed them—I’m guessing ’cause they didn’t plan on dying. The house, the land—it all goes to you, Tee.”
Travis sighs, shaking his head slightly. “You and Bobby may have it. I don’t want anything.”
“Up to you,” his brother shrugs and then, to Travis’s dismay, winks at Laura. “I’d recommend at least taking the gold.”
He takes off after that, leaving them to meet the dawn alone. It comes soon, tranquil and blue.
*
The bite on Travis’s shoulder closes a few hours later; within a day, it turns into yet another silver scar. Laura kisses it when she removes the bandage and hugs Travis from behind, inhaling the warm, human scent of his skin.
“Do you think you’ll be able to leave now?” she asks, and he covers the back of her hand with his.
“We’ll find out,” Travis responds after a beat of silence, “and if not—”
“—nothing changes. I’ll come back.” She kisses his shoulder again. “I love you.”
He turns where he’s sitting on the motel bed and pulls her with him, under him, onto the mattress.
“Say it again.”
“I love you,” Laura repeats, and he kisses her smile as she undoes his belt.
“Again.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he says in all the different ways.
*
Sheriff Hunnem visits them on Halloween morning. Laura watches him curiously as he flicks a brand new ID card at Travis.
“I’m doing this because I hope to never see you again,” the sheriff grouches. His gaze shifts to Laura. “And that goes for you as well, Miss Kearney. You better get on that Greyhound and leave this poor town behind for good.”
“Hank, my brothers are still gonna be around.”
“Don’t I fucking know that,” the man mutters into his mustache. Then his radio comes to life, informing him of a big fire somewhere out of town, and he hurries to leave, sending them one final I’m on to you glare as a goodbye.
Black smoke is still visible above the treetops when they board the bus. Laura takes the window seat, idly tracing circles on Travis’s palm. The Hackett Woods swim by as the bus is gaining speed, and at one point, she thinks she sees a woman with an albino boy walking on the side of the road. They disappear in the distance before she can tell for sure.
Travis intertwines their fingers, and Laura puts her head on his shoulder, closing her eyes.