Chapter Text
Hob had always slept well before the first World War.
Now, that wasn’t to say he didn't have nightmares. No, he'd occasionally get the life-relevant nightmare, but all of them seemed... sanitized, in a way? As if his mind didn't want to conjure up anything that would genuinely terrify him. The most that he'd had was a two-week period after his 1889 meeting with his stranger, wherein his dreams had cycled through that disastrous final conversation. But it ebbed quickly, and his honey sweet dreams continued.
So, Hob felt comfortable saying that for most of his long life, he dreamt of warm sandy beaches and the comforting buzz of the White Horse tavern, of all the parts of his life that made him love the world.
That all changed in 1916. Hob could only assume the day seeing as at the time he was knee-deep in the trenches, blood turning the mud crimson. He had more important things to worry about. What he did know, was that it began the day the sleeping sickness hit his area of the trenches.
Hob remembered down to the finest detail; he had been awake at the time, one of the few soldiers who could spend days at a time without sleep and live to tell the tale. The rain had been pelting down in cold, hard sheets, wind whipping along the trench hard enough to make even the most hardened of soldiers shiver in their boots.
He remembered the crack of thunder, nearly indistinguishable from mortar shells as he went to the dugouts to rouse another shift of soldiers. All the other soldiers woke easily, if a bit grumpily, except for a young man by the name of Eugene Almos. Now, Hob knew full well that soldiers could sleep through just about anything, but the second he saw the boy he knew something was gravely wrong.
Sleeping sickness, they called it. By the end of the day three more had been found, and panic was setting in.
Hob had seen fit to collapse into a dugout after a few hours of slowly brewing chaos. Despite being in the thick of a war sleep had always come easy to him, filled with memories of London and his dearest stranger. But instead of sweet dreams, he found himself dragged into the depths of a sea of nightmares. He was thrown awake within the hour, startling another soldier camping in the dugout to avoid the impending chaos.
Hob's first reaction was to catch his breath, and then panic. At this point all he'd known about sleeping sickness was the eternal slumber it trapped its victims in, and so it wasn't all that far to assume that sudden horrific nightmares might be a symptom.
He never did figure out whether or not his nightmares were caused by the sleeping sickness, thinking back on it. The sheer terror caused by the sleeping sickness sent both sides of the war into a scramble for a few days, attempting to figure out what the fuck was going on. Soldiers falling asleep never to wake up again, others unable to sleep, slowly going insane the more exhausted they became… it was unlike anything Hob had ever seen, and he'd been alive for well over half a millennium.
As the war dragged on, he found he could barely go a single night without being thrown awake in a panic. The nightmares were ceaseless, sometimes so identical to the horrors of war he’d wake up feeling as if he’d never gone to sleep in the first place.
But worst of all, it persisted after the war. He knew no one had ever recovered from sleeping sickness, but somewhere deep within him he’d hoped leaving the battlefield would snap his mind out of it. Hob Gadling, however, was not nearly that lucky.
But hey, life went on. Even if the sickness and the nightmares remained, Hob was good at focusing on the positives in his life. The second World War made it really, really hard, but he pulled through with some mental scars and a few new settings for his nightmares to cycle through.
Once he was out of it all, both wars, and facing a life in a world (hopefully) past destruction on that scale for the time being, he really had time to think about... everything. His nightmares, the wars, his enigmatic stranger.
There was a period after the end of the second World War to around 1985 wherein the nightmares ebbed, but the approach of his centennial meeting in the White Horse wrecked that entirely. While his sweeter dreams had only occasionally featured his beloved stranger, these new nightmares seemed to pounce on him like moths to a flame. Every other night he saw some nightmarish version of his oldest friend, either tormenting Hob with twisted versions of their 1889 meeting or standing at the edge of his personal hellscape, forever looking at him with those watery blue eyes that he'd only seen so cold once before.
That brought him to now, the grand old year of 1989.
It had been two weeks since he should have met up with his beloved stranger, and Hob hadn’t slept more than maybe 5 hours since then. He’d taken all his vacation days for his teaching job in the wake of this, citing something about a close friend being in the hospital and needing to take care of them. He hated lying to the school administration for something this trivial, but if he'd attempted to go to school in the mindset he was currently in, they would have fired him.
Even so, that left him to his own devices for a month. Hence now being stuck in his flat with nothing to do but pass out, have a nightmare, be thrown awake, rinse and repeat The cycle itself was almost as nightmarish as the hellscape plaguing his dreams, leaving Hob horrifically exhausted. He'd had worse, he tried telling himself, but it didn't make him feel any better.
His flat looked as if it had been hit by a small hurricane. Papers were strewn about, dishes and cutlery laying in the sink unwashed. The few plants he had on his window sill were- regrettably- beginning to wilt, after he’d forgotten to water them for the umpteenth time.
Hob ran a hand through his hair, tearing his eyes away from the sub plan he was attempting to make. He nearly done with the brunt of the work, though he was having a little trouble writing out instructions for the sub. Turns out, it was very difficult to make your handwriting legible while the edges of your vision are blurring.
He set down his pencil for what felt like the 15th time that day, rubbing his face, only to be abruptly pulled away by a tap-tap-tap coming from his kitchen window.
He stood up, stretching out languidly and walking over to the window. There he found a large black bird with a white chest sitting on his window sill, tapping its beak against the window very insistently. It looked up at Hob with eyes he swore were too intelligent to belong to an animal.
It stopped tapping, moving down to pick up a letter Hob hadn't noticed was held in one of its claws.
“What do you have there, mate?” Hob murmured, mostly to himself as he slid open the window. The raven- he'd decided it must be a raven based on its sheer size- seemed perfectly content to hop right into his apartment, flapping over to his cluttered dining room table.
The bird landed on a chair, dropping the paper in its beak onto the table. It turned around, cawing at Hob and then fluttering back onto the window sill to look at him expectantly.
“What is this?” Hob picked up the letter, flipping it around to look for some sort of return address.
On the back, the name “Hobart Goldfinch” was scrawled onto it in black ink, along with a familiar address. Now, Hobart Goldfinch just so happened to be Hob's last identity, which he kept throughout the two world wars and roughly 20 years after. The address on the letter led to his old house, the one under Hobart's name. All of this was strange; his current identity was one Robert Goldfinch, his son. The house had been sold nearly a decade ago when he moved to his current flat, and Hobart was legally dead.
He ripped the letter open, scanning the paragraphs. Past the flowery language and pleasantries, the letter boiled down to a party invitation from one Roderick Burgess. Looking further it seemed to be some sort of function celebrating the founding of the 'Order of Ancient Mysteries'. It was to be held at a manor somewhere out in east Sussex, in three days’ time.
Hob placed the letter onto the desk, rubbing his face. He knew Roderick Burgess's strange cult from a time between the first and second world wars, having been curious about what was going on with this 'Order'. He'd hung around a bit, and figured out they were just scamming rich people into funding their endeavours with a promise of immortality. The only thing he really noted as properly strange about them was a rumour that they had a 'devil in the basement', whatever that meant.
“This letter isn’t for me, you know. My name’s Robert Goldfinch,” He turned around, only to find the white-chested raven gone. “Well then.”
It was then that Hob properly came back to himself, standing in his messy apartment holding a letter delivered to him via raven through his kitchen window. He wouldn't put it past someone like Roderick Burgess to deliver letters by raven, but something about all this felt... strange. Too bizarre to happen to anyone but Hob Gadling, he guessed.
He shook his head, and closed the window tightly. He sat back down, ready to continue his work, but found himself unable to focus without his mind wandering back to the letter.
Hob knew he shouldn't even consider going, but... he picked up the letter again, sub plans forgotten.
He needed more coffee.