Chapter Two: The Vanishings at Dark Score Lake (2009)
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1
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The eleven-year-old Penelope would have been overjoyed to have had a sneak glimpse into her future twenty-one years from the day she'd sat by a lake and been told that maybe there was a lot more about her to be appreciated than she'd suspected at the time. The Penelope Garcia of now, who'd long ago come to realise her last name was a gift to be treasured instead of resented, sat in a world of her own creation with everything she'd ever dreamed of at the tips of her scurrying fingers. In here, this dark, closed-in office in Quantico lined by blinking screens and resplendent with colour from her many decorations, she was Queen of her Information Superhighway and safe from the brunt of the ickiness her team faced daily.
Usually.
On this day, she returned to her office with over-sugared coffee that Reid himself would have twitched his nose at, beads and bracelets jangling on every available surface of skin. Far from abandoning that girl by the lake, the one who'd doubted her love of colour and childhood and fun, Garcia had embraced it: as she dropped back into her office chair with a satisfied huff and wiggled her heels from her purple pumps, one hand brushing crumbs from the stomach she no longer hated because she knew she could work it to her favour, she was completely content to be herself.
And that continued until her phone rung, the line set aside just for her team to contact her swiftly blinking at her like an eye into the unsettling. Steeling herself for whatever she was about to be asked to dig up, their IT goddess in her little office kingdom, she answered: "Hotline to all things that go boo in the night, hit me."
"No funning this time," Derek replied, his voice the kind of sombre that had Garcia sitting upright and pushing aside her coffee and knick-knacks with her focus suddenly ramrod straight and locked on her main screen, fingers drifting to the keyboard. "We're sending you through a photo, Pen. We need names on all the kids in there, and we need them faster than ever."
As far as Garcia knew, they were in Maine looking for a missing girl. "I'm going to need some context on that picture," she warned him as the file uplink started processing on her screen. "I'm fast under pressure, but you'll get better results if you give me the good stuff, you know that. Dates, location, whatever—"
"Address will be patched through of the diner where the picture was taken. Garcia?"
Uh oh times one thousand. She recognised that tone innately as his 'I'm not playing anymore because I don't get what I'm looking at' voice, and he only used that when things had gone hokum. She braced, but still wasn't ready for what came next.
"Some of those kids in the picture? They're us, Pen. They're us. Nineteen-eighty-eight by Reid's estimates, and they're us."
But she didn't really need him to keeping telling her: she could see that just fine herself. There she was in all her eleven-year-old glory, looking cute as a button and so insecure next to Derek Muscles Morgan, who she was sure she'd never met until the day he'd asked her to join the FBI. Which, despite how brilliant she knew she'd always been, was definitely not at eleven.
"How is this possible?" she breathed, fingers still stalled on the keys. "I have no memory of this? Do any of us have memory of this? Gosh, Reid's cute—is that Reid? How old is he—I don't even know where to start with this, Derek, where do I start?"
Penelope Garcia, who at ten had been assaulted by a clown at a carnival and at eleven had taken her stepfather's name after her mother remarried and at eighteen had buried both her mother and stepfather, had never once in all that time stopped in a dingy diner on Old Derry Road to take a photo with people she couldn't possibly have known.
Pictures told a thousand tales, and the tale this one was telling was impossible.
"That's what we need you to find out. Think you can?"
Well, she was definitely going to try. If anyone could work out the impossible, it was her. After all, she wasn't eleven anymore, a year of life she suddenly realised she had no memory of. That was disconcerting. Garcia didn't much like not knowing things, like being ten and not knowing that what that clown had done was wrong wrong wrong and an adult should have been there to reassure her of that or not knowing just who the man who'd slammed into her parents' car and killed them instantly had been. Not knowing things had turned out to be Garcia's nemesis, her lifelong focus: she'd done everything she could since her parents' deaths—she was starting to realise that maybe her hatred of being left in the dark about things might have started a little earlier—to make sure she knew everything she could and, if she didn't know it, that she was surrounded by the resources she could use to rectify that despite not having Reid's eidetic memory.
As though she'd tempted it, a whisper of something touched at the back of her mind. A faded memory. A sallow smell and a snippet of an image: purple streaming through murky water, glimpsed through a crack in a rotting dock.
Jump, giggled a voice in her memory, her hands shaking suddenly upon her keyboard as she stared at her eleven-year-old face in the office of her thirty-two-year-old self and felt as though a terrible thing had slunk into her safe room with her. A fearsome memory, a bubbling laugh… the screen suddenly wavered in her vision, going blurry and soft-focus and reminiscent of how all world had been to her before she'd been eye-tested at the age of fifteen and found to have been struggling along with 20/100 vision uncorrected. Despite the glasses she wore now and had for over a decade, for a moment her world twisted back like it had used to be before she'd known there were leaves on trees or weaves in the carpet.
"Something's in the water," she said to the soft hum of her screens, before laughing at herself. Who was she speaking to? No-one here but her and the job she had to do, this impossible mystery only she had the resources to solve. The moment passed. Her vision stabilised. She got to work.
Nothing hid from her for long.
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2
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There were eyes on them at all quarters. They'd been given a room off to the side of the precinct—a paranoid part of Hotch noted that it had no direct line to any of the exits and the outward facing window was high and narrow—but no one seemed pleased that they were there. In the interrogation rooms just down the linoleum-lined hall, the two kids who'd been out with Tommy Hiscott sat waiting to be seen.
And Hotch's instincts were clamouring worse than they'd ever clamoured before.
When he'd started at the BAU, it had been with Gideon and Rossi alone to teach him everything they knew. Gideon had always been the scientist of the group, always sticking firm to his belief that what they did needed empirical basis behind it—a belief that had mellowed in those final years, after Boston—but Rossi had always attributed a fair amount of what they did to their guts. "Instincts have saved my life more than this has," he'd told Hotch one winter night in Manhattan, tapping the butt of his gun and nodding wisely. Hotch had always remembered that, even if he'd never quite followed it to the letter in the coming years as he'd come into himself as a leader and agent. But he remembered it.
Oh, he remembered.
And there were other things he was remembering today, ever since that diner. Things that bit and thwacked meatily against his brain like the gravel the tires had flicked up on the road to Castle Rock, pinging painfully against his thoughts and taking chips out of his stoic paintwork. The picture was tucked into Reid's shoulder tote, bumping against his hip, and Hotch kept looking at it as they set up a map of the area on the board they'd been given. He wished Reid would—
(run)
—put the bag down, shove it under a chair or behind the door or somewhere out of sight. Every time Hotch caught a glimpse of it, out of the corner of his eyes, another memory would take another chunk of paint, another hum of his instincts setting his teeth to grating tight. JJ and Rossi worked quietly together through the list of volunteers helping the search, but Hotch couldn't focus past that bag and the impossible picture within. Even as he glanced at Reid anew, he watched as the younger man paused, rubbing his eyes fiercely like they were hurting him, like—
(a man comes into our cabin at night. He)
—he was having just as much trouble focusing as Hotch was.
"Reid," Hotch barked, wincing at how sharp his voice sounded. Reid jolted before turning to him. His eyes were red. Weeping at the corners, the lids swelling shut and making him look exhausted, or stoned. "What's wrong?"
"I don't know," Reid said. "This hasn't happened in years. I think my eyes are reacting to my contact solution, but they shouldn't be. Not anymore."
"Did you bring your glasses?" JJ asked, standing and gently reaching up to get him to look down at her properly. "You need to take these out. Come on, you hit me. I don't understand, Aaron, why would you do that?"
"What?" Hotch stared at her, the word cutting loose from his lips as a slam of guilt/horror/shock assailed him. For a heartbeat of a second, he saw the shadow of bruises on her face, a cut lip, a split cheek, the whisper of a belt through denim loops, shshhhhhhshhhsnick, gonna show you what for, little pissant, little queer, show you what—
"I said come on, I'll help you rinse them." JJ gave him a look that was just as strange as the one he was sure he was giving her. "Are you okay, Hotch?"
"Case like this, it gets to all of us," Rossi said from behind him, anchoring Hotch to this moment, this room. Not twenty-one years ago, or prior, but right now. "If you're good to go, Hotch, we should talk to those kids before we go back out there. Find out exactly what happened, maybe we can give the search parties some direction."
"The picture," Hotch murmured, his gaze trying to skip to where JJ and Reid were leaving the room together, Reid digging through his bag for his glasses. The frame of the picture was visible, until the door banged shut behind them. The blinds were pulled. They'd done that because of the eyes on them, all those cops' distrustful faces…
"Garcia's dealing with it. Our job is to find Marcie Harris, or whatever's been done to her. You good for that?"
Hotch knew why he was asking, when before none of them would have doubted him. Oh, most of them still didn't—he knew that Reid and Prentiss, JJ too probably, were all determinedly trying to ignore that he'd been changed by Foyet's knife, but Rossi knew. Morgan too. Hotch figured the time was coming when one of them would pull him up hard, question his command, likely rightfully.
"I'm good for it," he said firmly, setting aside the Reaper and his own lost family and his slipping control. His brain was afire, but he fought the madness—Why does the memory of Reid in glasses make his gut twist? Why are his hands twisting into his suit pockets at the very thought, the very fucking thought, it's never bothered him before and especially not like this, with the burning scent of lemon and laundry soap in his nose? The burning taste of tears in the back of his throat, tempered by a scream—and he set it aside: there was a job to be done. "Which do you want? Girl or boy?"
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3
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While Rossi and Hotch were talking to the two teenagers who hadn't seen what had dragged Marcie Harris screaming and begging and puking with pure fear into the ravine, Garcia had delved deep into Derry. Old Derry, good old Derry. A history as deep and sordid as a well that had gone too deep and struck rotten, with poison water and creeping fingers of decay spooling up the sides reaching for the fresh air above.
Good old Derry.
In her safe, warm office back at the FBI Academy, Garcia was no longer feeling either of those things and doubted she ever would again. Derry might have been a well indeed; it had sure swallowed its share of children. Children like those in the photo, that terrible photo, grainy and washed out slightly. Developed long before digital had come along and taken over the world.
She'd found out as many of those thirteen children as she could—thinking all along what a terrible number of children that was, thirteen, and how even one more might have made it slightly less terrible, if she was the sort to believe in such superstition. There they were now, pinned up one by one on the corkboard behind her, watching her with their smiling faces, as many as she'd been able to track down. It had felt important, fatalistically so, that she find photos as close to the age they were in 1988 as she could, as though that would keep this image as distant as possible from the people they were now.
The thirteen children were as follows:
Aaron Hotchner, sixteen years old. His high school had digitised their senior yearbook photos and that was the image she pinned upon that board, with a white pin that cut her finger a little as she used it. If she turned her chair, his eyes caught her first, something dreadful in his fixed stare. He didn't smile in the senior photo like he did in that diner booth. He didn't look like he had any smiles left. His stare was unyielding, cold, unforgiving: like slate. Liable to shatter under unprecedented pressure.
Beside him, in a neat row like sparrows on a wire with their small heads all cocked to the camera, were the smallest of them: Sean Hotchner, six years old if his brother was sixteen and with no pictures that she could find even in her digital archive; Ethan Coiro, whose photo on her board was the grainy frozen-instant image from a Missing Child poster dated the summer of 1988; and Spencer Reid, who shouldn't have been there and yet was. Seven and six respectively.
Ethan wore a purple scarf and, if Garcia had looked for longer than an instant at his face before finding herself averting her gaze, she would have noticed a thin trickle of water trickling from his smiling mouth.
Emily Prentiss (seventeen, just a baby really, and Garcia wonders why she looks so shellshocked) opposite Aaron, her raven-wild hair only slightly calmer than that of her senior year photo pinned on the office wall. Derek Morgan and Jennifer Jareau beside her (fifteen and eleven, only eleven, just like Garcia had been), JJ's head turned to stare at the girl in the booth beside them.
Rosaline Jareau, date of birth the eighth of May 1971. Date of death: eleventh of August 1988. Garcia had stared at that for a long time, wondering why JJ had never told her. Told any of them.
And Garcia already knew the ones beside Rosaline: her hand drifting towards her cell as she considered calling her brothers and asking them what they hell they were doing in a diner on Old Derry Road. But she hadn't talked to Manny since her parents had died, and this seemed a poor reason to change that quite yet. To dredge up those sore memories and remind them what part she'd had to play.
She hadn't talked to Rafe since he'd run away and never come back. He hadn't even come to the funerals.
They'd never quite forgiven him for that.
The final two were Desiree and Sarah Morgan, Derek's sisters, and that was probably why it was Morgan that Garcia chose to call. After all, he'd always been her port of safe harbor before now—it seemed a safe bet that he would still be so now.
If she'd counted from one side of the photo to the other, from left to right, she would have noted that Reid himself was unlucky number thirteen, Ethan's hand curled possessively around his and the water beginning to pool on the pleather seats below them. Their fixed photo smiles had begun to falter.
Outside the diner, through the smeary windows, a wind blew gently.
Garcia saw none of this.
"Tell me you're not in Derry," she said as soon as Morgan picked up the phone, dispensing with the pleasantries as she turned her back on the photo still up on her screen. Over her shoulder, the silent image of the children they had been stared at her. All eyes her way.
Spencer was crying now.
"Not quite," Morgan responded. "I'm in between still, with the search parties. The rest of them have gone the other way, up to the town near the camp the kids came from. Why?"
"Because, oh love of my love, Derry is one seriously spooky place. I'm looking it up and I have no idea how you guys don't have weekend homes there. Want to guess how many kids they've listed as missing since we've begun keeping track of that kind of thing?"
Morgan didn't sound like he wanted to guess, which she figured made sense. It wasn't exactly a fun party game. "Just tell me. I bet I'm not going to like the answer."
Garcia sucked in a breath at that: he really wasn't. "It's impossible to get a firm number, but I'm looking at over two hundred disappearances, minimum. And that's a generous minimum—you don't want me to add on how many dead."
Behind her, water dripped from Ethan's eyes in a sickly torrent.
Ros's arms were bleeding.
Emily's face was bruised.
Aaron was standing, watching something approach beyond the frame of the picture.
"In how long?" choked Morgan, his breath rattling on the line. Utter shock. "How many years?"
"That's in just fifty-five years, and only if we include the ones from just Derry city limits. If we expand that to the surrounds, Derek, my god…" Garcia rubbed her eyes under her glasses, barely believing it herself. "This place is like the Bermuda triangle for minors. How have we not heard of this?"
In the photo, there were now fourteen.
"Want to know the ookiest bit? If I narrow the search to Castle Rock and the surrounds, which I guess encompasses where you are even though I can't find the camp's location anywhere, the number of missing kids goes down dramatically…" Her vision was wavering again. Garcia fiddled with the headset before taking her glasses off and reaching for something to wipe them with, eyes tearing up a bit.
"Sounds like there's a but there."
"There isn't… it just doesn't feel right. I can't explain it, Derek. I think there's more—" She cut off there with a gasped groan, the sound someone makes when frightened utterly and out of nowhere.
She'd turned the chair. Glanced at the screen with the diner photo.
Screamed and hurtled back without consciously recognising what had frightened her.
Now she was on the ground, glasses still in hand and headset barking Derek's voice at her from beside her. The chair lay on its side. She stared at that photo, at the fourteen blurry faces, none looking at the camera anymore. None save one.
When she slid her glasses back on, trembling and sick and barely breathing—hu hu hu hu hu came her breath, a reminder of something else—the photo was as it had always been. But she knew what she'd seen. She knew what had been there, censored by her blurry, uncorrected vision. Despite the fact that she'd barely seen anything at all, the image was burned into her brain as vividly as though she'd had her face pressed against the glass.
The clown.
The clown.
The clown with the mouth of madness, split wide open and opened wide, ringed with teeth and puckered gums. The clown with the claws that gaped, that chewed, that punched right in and held on tight. The clown with Aaron's head grasped tight in those talons; the clown that stared at her and smiled even as its mouth closed around Aaron's face. And all of them, staring at it. Watching it kill Aaron, kill Hotch. Kill their friend.
And they were laughing as he did it.
"Penelope!" she heard, ripping her out of her memory delusion. "So help me, answer me right now or I'm calling Anderson—"
She picked up the headset. She slid it on. She answered: "Please don't go there," with a voice that was shrill and young and not at all like it should be. "Please don't go back there."
"Back where?" Morgan asked, his own voice cracking with fear and something else. But she didn't need to answer: she'd heard that he knew in the way his voice had broken.
Camp Moribund.
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4
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There were those out there that remembered Camp Moribund, although they were outnumbered by those who had no recollection of that place or the time that they'd spent there. Some, for whatever reason, had clung to the memory of the glittering lake and those mouldering cabins and the distant old woman who watched the camp from her house on the hill but never came down to see if the children there were still breathing.
Some, likely for reasons of retaining their sanity, remembered nothing.
And some, the unluckiest of them all, were beginning to regain what they had been so blessed to lose.
Las Vegas, Nevada, Bennington Sanitorium: Diana Reid received a phone-call from her adult son. The doctors thought nothing of it, until they came to her room after the call and found her curled small and tight in the corner with her gaze locked on the wall opposite and her thoughts hundreds of miles away. Blood on her hands and her fingers cut. "William lied to me," she told the doctors as they tried to find where the blood was coming from. "He lied. He lied. He said we never sent him there, like cattle to the slaughter, our sacrificial lamb." Who, the doctors would ask, and she answered by screaming and screaming and screaming until they had no choice but to sedate her. All Reid had asked was if she'd remembered a Camp Moribund, or a lake named Dark Score. She remembered: oh, how she remembered, even if William refused to. But no one would ever believe her, the mad old woman, about how she'd listened to her six-year-old son begging for help over the phone—about how he'd screamed don't let it kill me and all anyone else listening had heard was, "We're having a great time!" No one had let her help him then, not her the paranoid schizophrenic imagining things again, and no one would let her help him now, even knowing her son was going back there. Back to Dark Score. Back to Derry. She knew there was no way he'd escape again. Not when he'd been so lucky the first time. And the price they'd paid for that luck, oh the price! Is it any wonder she'd gone mad?
JJ hadn't contacted her family yet; ever since her sister's suicide, there'd been a distance between her and her parents that she found hard to span. Her father's death from cancer had only deepened that gulf. But if she had, if she'd called Sandy Jareau and asked her about the photo taken in that diner on Old Derry Road, she wouldn't have gotten an answer anyway. Sandy knew nothing about Derry or Dark Score or the nearby camp… nothing except a thin shiver of cold and a worming bite of terror deep deep deep in her instinctive animal brain. And, on her wall, her family photos would stare back at her, Ros's smile frozen forever at seventeen and her father just as frozen beside her. Look at us, those stares seemed to say, just as much as the sepia-toned image over the flat-screen TV, the one of Sandy as a child standing on the shore of a long-forgotten lakefront with two boys beside her and her mother looking down fondly at them all. Look at us, those stares said too. Don't forget us.
Prentiss, who'd never really liked her mother all that much for all that she sometimes loved her deeply, didn't contact her either. She considered a text, typing it out three times before thinking twice and erasing them all. It hardly mattered. Ambassador Elizabeth Prentiss knew nothing of her daughter's seventeenth year except for a vague memory of police and a hospital and the distant feeling that perhaps her wayward daughter had run away. Certainly, she'd returned quieter, more obedient, more liable to sit in her room and do nothing troublesome. For the Ambassador, that had been an improvement: hadn't she always said Emily needed to be seen more and heard less? And she'd definitely been quieter after, aside from the nightmares. But they'd dealt with that. They'd dealt with that, taking Emily from psychologist to psychologist until they found one who'd help her without the quite frankly unnecessary diagnosis of trauma. Elizabeth had always thought, what trauma? Why, it had been a positive experience for them, Emily learning to appreciate what she had. And Emily would be thankful for it, one day.
Aaron Hotchner called no one because he had no one to call. His father and his belt were long-ago memories, buried at the same time. Sean was a stranger to him, somewhere in New York, he thought. Or Seattle. Anywhere where Hotch wasn't.
Chicago, Illinois: the Morgan family received a call from the oldest son, just as vague as the one Diana Reid had received. His mother knew nothing of a place called Derry or a summer camp nearby—raising three kids on her own, after their father died, when would she have had the funds or ability to send them to camp? Sarah Morgan, the youngest, shrugged and agreed. Camp wasn't something they'd ever had, growing up here. Desiree Morgan, after a long and stunned silence, said only one thing in response to her brother asking about that camp, implying that he planned to return. To go back.
"Don't."
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5
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"Don't," Tommy mumbled. It was all he'd say, over and over, his posture lurched at such an extreme angle that Prentiss worried for his spine. The boy in the bed, restrained to the bars lining the side, twitched and jittered at every shrill beep, every clatter from the hall, every raised voice. The hospital was nothing but a cascade of stimuli his brain couldn't comprehend to move past, this FBI agent by his bedside nothing more but one more thing to try and push away. Along with the memory of those eyes, those silver eyes. "Don't," he said again.
"Don't what, Tommy?" Prentiss asked patiently. "Do you know where Marcie Harris is?"
Tommy shook his head. The gesture was violent, a cord of muscle in his neck fighting the move. His whole body was locked tight, held tense. Hands curled into claws on his knees, nails torn. He bit at his lip, which bled.
"Don't," said Tommy once more. He stammered it. Choked on it. Spat it out. His lips kept moving long after the sound of the word had faded, still trying to force more, create language which was gone to him. Make something out of the nothing left behind. Lost to that ravine. To Marcie.
"What did you see?" Prentiss asked, watching the boy's face carefully. "Tommy, look at me."
Tommy looked.
"What did you see out there?"
Tommy shook his head, once, twice, three times. Don't don't don't chanted through his brain. Don't what? He didn't know. But it was important. He closed his eyes, opened them, closed them once more.
Saw silver glints of light on the red lids, a wide, toothy smile. A red smile. Like a wound. A gash. Or a knife.
To Prentiss, it was as though a very sudden change had come upon the boy before her. He uncurled, eyes snapping open, gaze suddenly locked on her. "He had a message for one of you, a man like you," Tommy said, his voice now calm and concise. Focused. Nothing else mattered. This was why he'd been spared when Marcie hadn't, even though It had made him look, made him watch—
"Who did?"
"The clown that killed Marcie. He had a message for his old friend, his best friend, for Spencer Reid."
Tommy would never know the impact his words had, the cold bubble of air he'd engulfed her in.
Emily breathed in slow past a sharp scream of pain in her abdomen, throat suddenly cold. "What did the clown want you to tell Doctor Reid?" she asked, despite having never wanted to know the answer to a question less in her life.
"Ethan's so glad he's come back," was the rasped message. "He's been waiting so long to play with him."
And Tommy Hiscott, who would die in five hours from this moment after slipping his bounds—no one would ever figure out how he'd gotten them undone or how he'd escaped the hospital without being seen—and wilfully walking back into the arms of the dead ones waiting, cried one last time as he whispered, "Don't listen."
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6
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The two teenagers found with Tommy Hiscott in the woods on Old Derry Road hadn't seen anything of use. Both corroborated each other's story, both were adamant that one minute Marcie had been there, the next she hadn't been there any longer. And Tommy hadn't done it—he couldn't have. Sure, the Tommy sitting in Castle Rock County Hospital listening to the windows whispering for him to join the dead, sure he seemed crazy as a skun goat now—but he hadn't been a mere five minutes before that. Not crazy at all, as they'd stolen a car and gone for a joy ride down to Derry just to get the stink of Dark Score off their skin. He'd been sane as a saint, they swore, that entire drive and all the time before it, even when they'd decided to stop at a rest stop near the diner for a piss and a smoke and a chance for Marcie and Tommy to fuck each other stupid in the bushes. Teenager things, normal things, sane things, except then everything had gone weird.
But Tommy didn't do it. When they'd heard the screams and run in there, they'd found Tommy screaming like a loon, his eyes crazier than they'd ever been before, and no sign of Marcie except her hand on the leaves. Nothing but the blood and the screaming and the deepest stink of putrefaction—and didn't the agents realise that there was simply no way Tommy could have killed her and hidden her body and ripped off her hand all in the time it took Jerry to piss and Carrie to light her third stolen Winston?
Morgan had called in then, as the team gathered back in the room they'd been given and worried over this. If Tommy hadn't taken Marcie, then someone else had—and that someone else was fast enough and deadly enough to have ripped a girl's hand off and taken her in the time frame the teenagers gave.
"It's getting dark out here, Hotch," Morgan said grimly, his voice crackling over the phone. "They're thinking of packing it in already, looking again tomorrow. I don't want to state the obvious, but with her hand severed and no medical help after this long… well, they're looking for a body and are motivated accordingly. Any luck with the parents?"
"None," JJ admitted. "I've been making calls up to that camp all day, trying to get these kids' details, but no answer. And they're not telling us anything about their homes. We can't hold them. What do we do?"
Reid was staring at his cell, fingers tapping lightly at the side and reading over and over the text lined up there neat and clean and deceptively digestible. A message from Prentiss, like so many messages before, appearing in its little yellow box right after her invitation to a movie night last Saturday. What had they watched then? He couldn't remember, too distracted by that text. Do you know someone called Ethan? Tommy mentioned you by name, as well as an 'Ethan'.
Ethan. Did he know an Ethan?
He thought he might.
"JJ and I will drive them two back up to the camp now then," he heard Rossi say suddenly, their voices snapping him back to the moment as he looked up and focused again on the now instead of that text. "We'll find out what the hell is going on up there, and see if there's anything there on Marcie that might help find her. Or at least contact her parents if Garcia's still coming up blank on that."
"Right, and Reid and I will stay here and wait for Morgan to come in." Hotch glanced to Reid, eyes flickering to his phone and mouth turning into a slight frown. "Is there a problem, Reid?"
"No problem," Reid responded, even though he could have answered with any number of things that were bothering him right at that moment—like where was Marcie Harris or why did the name Ethan make his bladder pinch and the hairs on his skin stand on end or his concerns about antibiotic resistance bringing about the next global pandemic or— "Would you mind if I joined Emily at the hospital? I want to talk to Hiscott about something."
Hotch waved him away. He trusted Reid implicitly: the man would do what he saw necessary to find Marcie, or whoever had taken her. And if he was gone, perhaps he'd take that damnable picture with him too…
But Reid never made it to the hospital, driving through the dimming twilight with his mind twisting around and around that name and a haunting memory of a boy calling out for him from the dark. He didn't feel safe. He didn't feel right, his hands clammy around the steering wheel and his photographic memory guiding him unerringly to the hospital despite having never travelled these streets before (or so he thought). The radio, playing yet another emergency broadcast calling for information on the whereabouts of Marcie Harris, grated on his aching head, his hatred of driving and his worries about this case pulling all together until he pulled up in the parking lot of the location he'd checked a town map for before leaving and found—
It wasn't the hospital. Reid blinked, ran back over his route in his head, and found that he'd somehow ended up in completely the wrong quarter of Castle Rock. The squat, brick building in front of him was small and brightly lit, the doors thrown open against the night and letting forth a welcoming pool of light. It'll be warm inside, Reid thought without consciously realising he was cold, leaving the keys in the ignition as he stepped out of the SUV in a daze and walked towards those open doors. Following a path his feet had taken so many times before, so practised at it that he tripped on the steps as his brain misjudged his height, hand catching the lower rung of the guardrail despite having to stoop to do so. His cane hanging almost forgotten by his side, his brain too frazzled to register the pain signals his knee was sending, he straightened and stared.
And then he stepped inside, past the tattered posters announcing community events, church fetes, fairs, sales—
(Spencer, there you are. What would you like to read today? )
—and finding himself standing in front of a brightly painted banner: Come Read Together! Castle Rock Public Library is
(safe)
open to all!
"Can I help you?" asked the librarian, who was younger than she should be with black hair instead of brunette, which felt wrong to Reid, completely wrong, but he was too lost to speak. All he needed to do was push past the shyness he'd fought and conquered before joining the FBI, the shyness that had crippled his childhood and adolescence, stopping him from ever having a friend (except one), but he'd regressed somehow to ten years before, fumbling and stammering and flushing red instead of speaking clearly. He couldn't do it.
He couldn't find the words to say, "I'm looking for
(sanctuary)
.
7
.
"—Marcie Harris. She's from here, right?" JJ eyed the small groups of teenagers of varying ages, their brightly logoed polos labelling them as counsellors for the camp that they'd found tucked up right against the lake, the gateway almost overgrown and hidden by the brush. No one had cared about this place in a long time, JJ had thought as they'd driven up a bumpy, unlit drive to find the camp at the end just as neglected as the sign out the front that would have once read Camp Moribund.
"Why?" asked one, a girl with enough makeup on that the skin around her eyes seem to crack as she widened them. "She in trouble? Why are Jerry and Carrie sitting in your car? You cops?"
"Any adults around here?" Rossi asked, eyes skimming the campground decisively, spotting the trash blown about and gathering into pockets and corners, the belongings strewn everywhere by kids without care, the barely-held together cabins sitting there in lines of three like squat, fat cages at a circus filled with barely alive animals. "You lot aren't the only ones looking after them, are you?" And he pointed past the bedraggled line of eight tired looking teenagers, to where small, worried faces peeked out of those squatting cages. Some out of smeary, cracked windows, some crouched by battered doors. The camp, in the gloom of the new night, didn't look like anyone should be living here at all, no child, no rat, not even the bugs flying into the overhead light illuminating this dirty square.
"Her." A hand was pointed, the nails bitten back low and bruises on the knuckles, to a distant light up the hill. "She's here."
Slow nods followed that. JJ stared at these kids, her stomach lurching hard. They looked tired and hungry, and scared. They looked scared. Of the night, of JJ and Rossi and the guns they wore on their hips, of the revelation that one of their own was missing.
"Who is she?" she asked, receiving no answer, just glazed stares.
Distantly, the lake slapped at the shore.
"I'll get them," Rossi murmured, vanishing back to get the two teenagers out of the SUV and leaving JJ standing there with the counsellors.
"How many kids are here?" JJ was already aching to pick up her phone and start calling these kids' parents, CPS, any fucking one who'd come here and feed them and love them and take them away from this contaminated place.
"Dunno," said one of the teenagers, this time a boy with blue eyes and a cut mouth. "Used to be three dozen kids, roughly. But some are gone."
"Lots are gone," another whispered, a shudder floating through the group.
"Don't talk about that," someone snarled. "We're not to talk about it. We'll be next if we tattle—like Marcie. She tattled."
"Marcie tattled about what?" The night was growing colder around them, JJ wishing she'd brought a jacket. On the back of her neck, the fine hairs were standing on end—like eyes had swept over her, had settled upon her, familiar eyes… "About this camp? Are you mistreated here?"
Silence answered her. She was looking at a row of stony eyes as Rossi's footsteps returned, the teenagers trudging behind him. The closer they'd gotten to this camp, the quieter the two of them had gotten, until they looked as they did now: much like the rest of the people here.
Resigned to their fate.
"We need to talk to the adult here," JJ murmured to Rossi, watching as the teenagers began to slip back into the darkness, herding children into the cabins as they went. "Is there even power connected here? I don't see lights in any of those rooms."
"Sometimes she turns it off," Jerry said, his voice too loud in the quiet night surrounding. "It's a good time to stay away when she turns it off."
Neither Rossi nor JJ had any idea how to even approach that, JJ thinking suddenly of her small son and how she'd have torn any place to the ground if it had treated her child like this. Rossi just breathed in slowly and reached to his belt for the flashlight he carried, lighting their way up the steep path to the house overlooking the darkened camp.
Every step to three of their small group, clustering close with no real reason for why they were clinging, was torment. Every step was a step closer to something terrible, something hidden in this dark night. JJ found herself carefully practising the breathing a long-ago psychologist had taught her, square breathing to control her anxiety following her sister's death. A trick she hadn't needed for a long time, but which felt as natural to her right now as breathing normally would. And, despite the silence of the teenagers following, she led the way unerringly despite this path they walked having long ago been washed out by time and the rain and the uncaring nature of the world around them.
Until they were there. The house loomed ahead, Rossi glancing curiously at JJ as though to wonder how his teammate had found this place so easily once they'd been swallowed by the overgrown trees. But she wouldn't have answered even if he'd asked, because she was walking up the path—lined with thick slabs of slate making a crooked line, she stepped stepped stepped from one to another making sure not to step on any cracks—and reached her hand up to brush them against a dark patch of paintwork on the faded wood surrounding the front door. It was the only spot where the original colour remained, the rest of it weathered.
It was the spot where, until recently, a doorbell had sat. JJ pressed her fingers to that spot now, closing her eyes and hearing it chime as loudly as if she'd been inside that house itself, listening for the chime. A giggle bubbled out of her throat, never voiced as she bit it back sharply, tapping her finger on that spot again from habit and glancing sharply to her side as though expecting someone to be standing there shaking her head at her, saying
(stop playing with it, Bluejay, you'll make Grandpa mad)
"Does anyone even live here?"
She jolted, blinking and finding Rossi standing there, tall and greying and grizzled instead of who she'd expected. Instead of answering, she knocked sharply, the police knock. Three times without any pause: the kind of knock anyone would feel nervous upon hearing in the middle of the night.
The knock she'd learned as an adult, not a child.
"She's always here," Jerry said distantly, as shuffling footsteps came towards the door. No light illuminated the grimy windows lining the doorway, or lit up the black voids of the windows beside them, but there was certainly someone coming slowly. Dragging, cautious steps as though the person making that sound was reluctant or infirm in some way.
The door opened. The woman stared, first, at Rossi, and then at JJ.
JJ swallowed, hard.
"Grandma," she said from what felt like a million years ago, Rossi doing a double-take beside her as he registered her words. "Hi."
"Jennifer," said the grandmother JJ hadn't seen since she was eleven years old, not since Ros, her voice much the same as it had always been. "You're late. Come in—and take your shoes off at the door. You kids are always tracking mud in."
And then she was gone, back into the darkness of the house.
They had no choice but to follow her.
.
8
.
In an abandoned building in DC, littered with broken glass and graffiti and the debris of many broken lives, there stood outside a public phone booth. The hardened plastic panes had long ago been popped out, the cradle itself was marred with burns, and the whole thing smelled very distinctly of human waste. In fact, the phone itself hadn't worked for years. Those who passed it thought nothing of the relic of a faded past or, if they thought of it at all, they wondered when the council would come in and tear it down.
On this day, a man was passing. He was a nondescript man, with worried blue eyes and sandy hair cropped short, the lines around those eyes aging him more effectively than the heavy great-coat he wore that was fifteen years out of style or the thin, wire-frame glasses perched upon a narrow nose. He walked slowly as though time weighed heavily on him, and focused on nothing as though his mind struggled to work under that weight.
The public phone, as he passed it this day, rang.
He stopped, staring at that phone. It shouldn't be ringing. The thing was quite obviously broken, why, it didn't even have a cord attaching handset to cradle. But ringing it was, shrilly and insistently, and the man did exactly what most humans his age who'd grown up how he did had been conditioned to do: he answered it. And he listened.
And he smiled.
The man, who only months before had ambushed Aaron Hotchner in his apartment and stabbed him approximately nine times while ensuring the agent had known just how incorrect the supposition was that knives were a sexual surrogate, was George Foyet. He had the deaths of thirty-five people on his soul and was proud of each and every one. In fact, he was already thinking about how good number thirty-six and thirty-seven was going to feel, as the voice on the phone told him exactly where to find them. Before he'd even hung up, without questioning the coincidence or the commands he'd been given—no Reaper questions the devil's desires—he was already on the hunt. If Aaron Hotchner was in Maine, well now, wouldn't he like a little family reunion?
After one quick stop that was, at a little corner house in DC where a happy family wouldn't be quite so happy anymore—because Foyet always honoured his side of a deal. The voice had given him Haley and Jack Hotchner: in return, he would give the voice what it wanted.
And, from deep underneath Derry, the caller waited patiently for a trap that had been twenty-one years waiting to finally spring closed.