"Fear is fertile and rage is its offspring."
Stephen King
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AN: HAPPY HALLOWEEN. This is an It crossover, but it's so geared towards Criminal Minds fans that I'm not putting it into the crossover section where it will die a lonely, miserable death on ffnet. You don't need to be familiar with It to read this-it should stand alone, I hope! It's more of a fusion, anyway.
I feel that it's apt for my last Criminal Minds fic that isn't an already-started series to be the horror fic that I've always dreamed about writing, so here it is! I'm super excited about this one, not gonna lie. It's been such a blast to work on.
MASSIVE thanks to my amazing beta, Addle, and to my cheerleader and Stephen King expert, SatuD2. I love you guys.
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Prologue: On the Road to Derry (2009)
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1
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There was a diner on Old Derry Road. It was the diner that time had forgotten, much like time had forgotten Derry itself. Those who visited the sleepy town tucked away in a corner of Maine that no one really thought about all said the same thing of it: leaving was like turning the clock forward. Time didn't just restart the further one got from the tired old Victorian buildings with their faded weatherboard and peeling painted faces, it sped up. Once the car had bumped along the last dirt road and turned back onto the interstate that ran so smoothly past Derry. A damn shame, they'd said when the interstate was built; almost certainly the death of the town, although that had turned out to be untrue.
Once all the trash and dust of Derry had been shaken out of the interior of the absconding vehicle, it seemed as though the modern age raced to catch up. The surroundings didn't seem as faded. The trees held more life the further one drove. People smiled more, although the citizens of Derry would argue this. A friendly town, they'd say. A sensible town. Life could be slow here because it wanted to be, and if you didn't like it you could just keep on driving up to Portland or Bangor and be happier for it.
If they wanted to be happier still, they should have just kept driving and driving, out of Maine and then further yet, until they tipped right off the edge of the earth and away from what lurked within.
But, of course, they didn't know that.
The diner, which wasn't actually within the city limits, had found that this strange, liminal quality of Derry had, much like mould, spread. Also like mould, it seemed to happen in spurts. Slowing in the hot, quiet in-between years, when not much of interest occurred, and then speeding up in sudden bursts of stormy, humid happenings. Wet weather drove it. Rain brought rivets of water that seeped and sunk into the thirsty ground, drawing what was buried deep below upwards. Worms and rot and mould and hunger. By this time, in the early summer of 2009, the diner on what was now—although hadn't always been—Old Derry Road had been long ago devoured by the timeless hunger that Derry exuded. To put it another way: It was here.
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2
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Like a link of black ants, the sleek, black SUVs pulled up outside that exhausted diner, wheels crunching on the loose asphalt. One bobbed into a pothole no one had cared enough for twenty years to repair, hardly interrupting the fierce silence of the inhabitants. The others, seeing the danger, avoided it deftly. To the people gathered around the diner, a rabble that was louder than the size of the gathering would assume, it was as though something from out of this world had reached in with shiny, governmental fingers to interrupt their sleepy days.
From somewhere below, It knew.
Inside the diner, a scene was set. Five men; three women. Three of those were police in brown uniforms with stunned stares. Four more were witnesses, just as stunned as those police. A man in a suit three sizes too big, hoping the feds didn't search him to find the oxys in his breast pocket. He'd simply been passing by when he heard the screams: in a kinder world, he'd have just kept on going. The woman who owned the diner, tremendously fat with skin that glistened with more than sweat, grease-stained and kind-faced and the sort of person who was never going to forget what she'd seen today. In fact, three years from now, a heart attack would bring her life to a disinterested end on these very faded floors, heart stalling on the thin linoleum as her brain misfired and stopped and, at the last, thought again of this very day. Two teenagers who smelled of alcohol and each other: Tommy Hiscott, splattered with blood and cuffed to the radiator where he'd been for some time now, was their friend, as was the body that probably existed, somewhere supposedly known by someone in this room—an incorrect assumption made by the law enforcement personnel who really couldn't be blamed for assuming so, seeing as the boy had been found holding what surmounted to be the missing girl's hand.
A usual crowd in unusual times: aside from the blood and the tears and the rabid gleam in the cuffed boy's eyes, it could have been any other Tuesday in any other forgotten diner, with the same cracked pleather booths, the same faux-fifties memorabilia, the same wall of photos containing faces lone gone on to better places than Derry, Maine.
In came the feds. The woman counted them as they came, her hand twitching as though curling around a pen she wasn't holding, the cursory greeting she'd given for thirty years now—but wouldn't for much longer—pausing on her lips. Today wasn't a greet and feed kind of day, and her heart hopped with a kind of ragged anxiety that was more excited than frightened. Terrible or not, this was something she'd never seen before, bringing more people than ever as the staties out front set up search parties from up the road to find the girl the hand in the nearby cooler belonged to. This, she supposed, was something she'd be talking about for the rest of her life, or until the novelty wore off—whichever came first.
They didn't look much like feds, Officer Harold Gardener, on loan from Derry, thought at first. The first one did, and perhaps the second—two men in suits with faces suited to pushing their weight around. The third that entered, eyes immediately finding the boy on the radiator, was fed material too, he figured, all thick with no brains. And black—he also noted that, himself uncaring of it but noting it for later, in case someone kicked up a stink. The rest? Women and a man on a cane who looked like he wouldn't have been out of place getting his evening beer at the Falcon.
"Good luck," was all he said to the front-man, the one with the hard jaw and cold eyes. "We've got nothing out of them. Reckon we're looking for a body, but."
"We don't know nothing," said one of the teenagers, a boy. Bleached-white hair straightened until it burned, his lip bitten through by a line of silver studs. He was bleeding, Gardener noticed. Nipped at those stupid studs until he'd bled. "Marcie was behind us until she wasn't, and none of us know shit."
His name was Jerry Dalton. He was fifteen years and five months old, sure that he'd marry the girl sitting beside him and without any clue that he'd be one of those this hot summer swallowed. The team, when they dug further into his past, would find nothing untoward except a minor citation for underage drinking and a small fire he'd accidentally set playing with matches when he was seven. Dalton was a good boy, and he'd be a good boy until he died in much the same strange way Marcie Harris had prior to him.
"Who's in charge here?" asked Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Hotchner, taking in everything they'd been called in to try and understand. "And why aren't there dogs out looking for her?" He'd seen what was missing in the rabble outside: motivation, for one. Most of them just seemed bored, or interested.
"Well, it's the damnedest thing," began Gardener.
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3
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Marcie Harris's body lay at the bottom of a narrow ravine sunk deep with rotted leaves and a seeping, sallow smell. It was only seven miles from the diner where the terror had finally reached, but it would be almost two weeks until someone found it. By that point, the rot had set in, the bacteria that set off the complicated process of decomposition having no care for such human things such as grief or misery or caring that the person they were eating away at was a daughter and a friend and aspiring author. When the body was found, the coroner assigned to her would say much the same as Gardener had: it was just the damnedest thing, you see, the damnedest. Never seen much like it before. You see, Marcie was putrefying into a rotten mess in the middle of a forest, in a damp crevice cushioned by leaves and dirt and broken roots. By the time they discovered her body, she should have fed the forest that sheltered her. Maggots and ants and beetles and hungrier jaws than the ones that had killed her should have found her first.
They hadn't. Despite the decay, not a bug nor a fox nor a hungry cat had even dared to nibble at her.
Ain't that the damnedest thing.
As unchewed upon as her body was, the coroner could easily see the damage that had been done to it. "I say they lock that boy up and throw away the key," he'd tell the feds questioning him. "Not even the animals did what he did to her."
Upon seeing her autopsy report, they'd very much agree. Marcie had died screaming; the wounds on her side, deep and sunken and bruised like they'd gone in very slow, had bled copiously. She'd been alive when whatever had been driven into her body had done so. When asked what caused those hooked, sucking wounds, the ones that curled right into her side and under her tit like they'd been reaching for her panicked, frantic heart, the coroner would simply shrug. Fifty-eight years and he'd never seen a thing like it.
On their way out, he'd murmur, "Fingers." When prompted, he'd deny having said anything.
But secretly, and in his darkest moments, he'd always envision that the tool used had been someone's awful, grasping hand, despite knowing that no one could possibly have done that with their fingers alone—especially not a teenage boy, even one as deranged as Tommy Hiscott.
Undeniably, her hand had been bitten clean from the wrist and Tommy had never had any blood in his mouth, but that detail was lost in the rush of everything that had come next.
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4
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"The dogs won't search," said Agent Derek Morgan to Emily Prentiss, coming over to where she was standing by the check-in station and reading through the list of neatly penned names there. The sun overhead was hot, a thin sheen of sweat lining his brow and a furrow of worry tracing hers. "Handler tried again just then and, nothing. They just cringed until he put them back in the car. You ever heard of something like that?"
"I'd cringe too if I had fur under this sun," Prentiss commented.
Gardener had been wrong to discount her purely because what was in her slacks wasn't the same as the man beside her, or the men within the diner behind them. Dark eyes hidden by darker shades scanned the parking lot, razor-sharp bangs hiding her cool expression; she was a knife-blade honed sharp by the FBI with a mind as dangerous as the gun at her hip—and the one on her ankle. She had a shadowed anger buried deep that was quicker to burn than any of them, hidden hurts festering. If pushed to breaking, she'd snap gloriously; the man beside her was just as angry but with none of the fantastic control.
Hotchner headed their group with an ease that corralled them both; they'd have followed him to the ends of the earth and leapt off if he'd said so, but only if he'd justified the rationality of the decision. A dangerous combination, that loyalty combined with their intelligence—but it wasn't the first time that combination had come to this place and gone away sorer for having done so.
"Something here stinks," Morgan said. It didn't add up, not a damn whit of it. Reid wasn't getting shit out of the boy cuffed to that radiator; JJ and Hotch were having just as much luck with the friends. And there was a foul scent nearby, one that made him feel like maybe the dogs had the right idea of it. He sniffed and frowned, eyes scanning the forest surrounding.
It wasn't Marcie, not quite yet. Her blood still ran. Later, he'd think it was just the air of this place. A bad wind blows from Derry, and they were close enough to the town to really feel it.
"We got more people coming down from Castle Rock," said the woman—barely a girl—manning the check-in station. Tight shirt with dark circles ringing the neck and pits, she chewed at something and jabbed her pen at a map. "Here. It's where that lot came from, in there." The pen was jabbed at the diner and the teenagers within. "Camp No-Hope up there, that shithole. Sorry, can I swear around you? You're not like, language police, right?"
Prentiss ignored that. "Camp?" she asked. They hadn't been told about a camp. They hadn't been told anything—just that there was a missing girl, assumed dead, and a severed hand with no girl attached. When asked where the teens had come from, they'd gotten shrugs, stares, sweet-fuck-all. "What camp?"
"Here, at Dark Score," said the girl, chewing gum popping and blowing a waft of mouthy mint over them. Pen tapped again at the map, at a lake set just away from the small dot marked 'Castle Rock', further up from the dot listed as 'Derry', and fed into by a river that ran right by them both. "I recognise that girl's hat. They've all got them, those uniforms. Camp Moribund. Hell of a place."
"How come no one has called the camp supervisors to inform them the kids are all the way up here?" Morgan asked.
"There aren't any," was the answer. "No one cares about them. They're all rotten."
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5
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"Anything?" Agent Jennifer "JJ" Jareau asked her colleague quietly as the man sat beside the blank-eyed Tommy on the grimy floor, a cane across his lap and one leg held out in a stiff line.
"He needs medical attention," was Dr Spencer Reid's immediate response, something he'd been saying from the first moment he'd crouched in front of Tommy and gotten nothing but wide-eyed panic. "At the very least, he's in shock." Despite the fact that his degrees weren't of the medical sort, Reid was absolutely qualified to make this call: his sunken eyes and carefully angled bone structure—like whoever had designed him had set every slider to pretty, discounting what he'd choose to devote his life to where 'rugged' might have been apter—housed an intellect that was a finely honed as Prentiss's anger. He was twenty-eight at this moment, paused on the cusp of his life being altered forever by what was coming, and the youngest of the team by far. When he'd been six years old, they'd given him a Weschler and declared him a 'genius', a term he'd come to resent, before leaving him alone to grow up intelligent enough to see all the broken parts of a human. In the boy beside him, he saw his mother's eyes in her worst moments.
JJ trusted him completely. "Tommy, if we get you help, will you speak to us?"
Tommy said nothing. Whatever words he'd once possessed, they were lost in the silver-bright sheen of his sanity shattering. What sat here wasn't the boy who'd taken his friends on a joyride to breathe the summer air away from the place they'd been locked away in like sheep in a pen awaiting the bolt.
"I'll get Hotch." JJ stood, eyes scanning the room as she, once again, tried to chase away the weirdest feeling of knowing this place—the feeling slipping as she looked back down at Reid and felt grounded. Despite the focus on her work, on this job that was savage and cruel and tore her away from her family more often than she'd like, her boyfriend and two-year-old son, she loved these people and it was that love that sparked unexpectedly then, as such love tended to do, when she noted how kindly Reid spoke to the shattered boy beside him. "Spence?"
When he looked at her, eyes a troubled shade of hazel, she said with her own blue—in the way of two people who'd worked together a long time, who knew what the other needed, who simply understood—
—Did he do it?
Reid shook his head: no.
And that was that, although neither of them would ever stand in a court and argue for Tommy's innocence: with what was coming, they'd never have a chance. But they didn't know that yet, they were simply doing their job, the job they expected to keep on doing until they couldn't do it any longer.
Which was true, for many of them.
When JJ said to Hotch much the same thing, he gave her a look that was as distracted as she felt. "I'll handle it," he said, moving away to do just that with his shoulders the stubborn kind of set that they'd all become used to seeing on him. With what was going on, JJ thought, she'd have been rigid like that too.
It left her with the last of their field team of six, David Rossi.
"You grew up around here, right?" he asked suddenly, looking at her. "Ever heard anything like that?" He pointed at the nondescript blue cooler they'd shoved the hand into for lack of anything else to do with it until someone qualified came to tell them otherwise.
"I didn't," JJ said, before being struck by a feeling of wrong and a flush of remembering. "My grandparents live out here though, somewhere. Mom grew up near Penobscot, the river, but we never visited. Pretty sure she would have mentioned something like that though—why?"
Rossi held up his cell-phone, the glossy screen lined with text. "Had Garcia send through anything of interest on the way over. This isn't the first weird murder here, or rather, close to here. Derry's lousy with the dead—have we ever had a case there?"
"Not in my memory. Reid's, maybe." They both smiled tightly at the mention of their friend. "Dave? How's Hotch?"
Rossi glanced at his friend's back as the man argued with the statie who'd declared jurisdiction on this case and was digging his heels in on that. "As good as expected," was all he replied.
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6
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Aaron Hotchner had never taken a Wechsler test: if he had, the results would have landed him far closer to Reid than anyone would have guessed. A man made of causes and duty to those causes, he was firm in the face of calamity and a determined protector of those around him. So far as he knew, he'd always been this way. Stern and unsmiling and loyal to a fault. Loyal to his job, which he allowed to consume any part of him that might have been softer, and loyal to his wife, although not loyal enough to stop her from sleeping with another man and then taking their son and leaving. Hotch didn't blame her for this, although a softer man might have since she had married him knowing full well the kind of man he was—one who'd always put the job first when the job involved saving lives—but he did miss his son. He missed her too, and not just because when there was a warm body in his bed it was easier to dull the intensity he cultivated at work, although it was becoming apparent that that was a part of it. A man like him, he took it as a personal failing that he missed fucking her just as much as he missed kissing her—although it paled in comparison to what he'd done to them both in the ruining of their lives.
He was a hard man but his job was harder: five months before, one of the men he'd hunted had instead hunted him. His ex-wife and child were in witness protection, hidden from the world that would kill them for loving him, but here he was. Still living his life with the name he was born with and failing them every day he did so. The Reaper was a monster, the deadliest one—until now—Hotch had faced. Until now.
But the Reaper was just a man, much like every monster—until now—Hotch had faced.
"We'll question him when he's been seen to," he said firmly to the man who was arguing that their only hope of finding Marcie alive was in furthering the neglect of the boy inside the diner. "I'll escort him to the nearest hospital myself. He won't be out of our custody the entire time."
"I still think it's foolish, but I guess you won't be stopped." The man shot him a disgusted look, one Hotch was well used to. He didn't like stepping on toes, but he would if needed. "I'll get you an escort to Derry."
"Where's the boy from?" Hotch pressed. "He must have family. Someone we can contact for him, as well as the others."
"Them? They're from the camp just past Castle Rock. No point calling there, they won't come for them." The cop gave him another look, this one suggesting that he was stupider than the dirt he stood on and just as useful. Hotch let him look. This man was nothing: Hotch hunted monsters daily. "They're always losing kids."
"Losing?"
"Runaways, the lot of them. I wouldn't bother. You'll see—this lot is just like them. Something in the water up there sends the kids nuts. Don't think we've ever had a good one out of there. I can't name any, anyway."
Hotch stared at the man with no expression crossing his features. Despite this, the man felt a thin thread of discontent worm its way deep into his self, like he was being surveyed and found wanting. "No," said Hotch. "I don't suppose you can. You've been a… help. Officer."
And he could tell, although it wasn't being said, that no one really cared about what had happened to poor Marcie Harris, they were simply here for the spectacle of it all.
Disgusted, he moved inside to fetch his team and the teenagers no one cared about either.
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7
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Reid was staring at the photographs on the wall. The team was gathering their belongings, Morgan and Prentiss clashing over whether two of them should stay to help with the search and which of those two it should be. Hotch was replacing the cuffs on Tommy with his own, gently and with thought to the sharp angle the boy's arm had been held at for some time now. JJ was finishing the witness statements. It was any other crime scene he'd seen before, any other place in the world.
Except, apparently, it wasn't.
Rossi noted his expression first, turning and seeing Reid leaned heavily on the cane that supported him, the bullet-wound in his knee weakening the limb enough to require the implement. The cane aged him, but not as much as the look on his face right now did: Reid's skin was washed out, his eyes wide, his fingers cramped tight around the grip. "Kid?" Rossi asked him, stepping closer. "Reid?"
Reid looked at him, then back to the wall, reaching with a hand that trembled to tear a photograph from the wall there. Hundreds of faces looked back at him, right back from when the diner had opened in 1963, some of them smiling, some scowling, some just staring. The photograph he held shook so much the faces upon it were blurred, their features hidden.
The others had fallen silent. Perhaps they guessed, somewhere deep inside them, as the stink of this place reasserted itself into their noses and reminded them that they were somewhere known… perhaps they guessed what he'd found. As Reid had told them many times, the olfactory senses—smell—were the ones most vividly linked with the recollection of memories. Derry, and the surrounds, stunk. Not in a way that was noticeable, unless you'd lived here long enough to see the rot that bit into everything eventually, but in a way that was innate. An animal hunted always remembers the reek of the hunter once its escaped, just in case that threat comes back knocking.
Knock knock, Reid thought a little hysterically, looking at that photo with the strangest feeling like he was losing his fucking mind. Welcome home.
"What'ya doin' with that?" the woman who owned the diner barked, seeing it. "Put that back. It ain't yours to be tearing." She had fond memories of the faces within, which is why it was displayed so prominently. A table-full of kids gone on to better places, she hoped, although she couldn't recall the names attached to the faces, not really. Just feelings. Them were good kids, she was sure, those ones that had visited twenty-one and some years ago.
"Reid, we're—" Hotch began, but Reid looked at him. He'd never forget that look, not ever.
The photo was held up. They all looked at it, none of them realising what he had. Not at first.
Then Emily saw it: the girl furthest from the camera, the one with the fiercest scowl. That was her scowl, her eyes, her bangs despite the wild hair above them. Morgan and JJ saw it next, simultaneously. Side-by-side right now as they were in the photo. Rossi just shrugged, confused. He wasn't pictured. Hotch was, staring at his eighteen-year-old self who was, in turn, staring at Emily with a smile on his mouth that was as unfamiliar as this diner was, despite the photo saying otherwise.
And Reid right there, sitting on the end of the booth with his feet unable to touch the ground, looking at whoever was holding the camera and smiling shyly. Another boy beside him, just as small as he was. He counted: there were thirteen children in this photo, crushed into the three booths pictured. He didn't remember any of them, besides the ones he was standing with now—and Garcia, sitting beside Morgan with her eyes averted. "Why is there a photo of me in a diner I've never been in, surrounded by people I didn't meet until I was twenty-two?" he asked, a question no one there could really answer.
And the storm that they'd been living in the eye of for the last twenty-one summer years crashed down upon them finally.