Devils in the Details

Chapter Eleven // Curse of the Nocnitsa

IN WILL GRAHAM'S HOTEL ROOM

Will missed Molly.

At the end of the day, these were silly sorts of thoughts - she was just around a few corners, down a street, through a few doors. He could technically go find her at any time. She made it clear that she was more than willing to take his calls, his texts, his everything.

But the solution to his problems didn't lie in those. No, after a whole night of staying awake, he found that he spent half of it thinking about her and the other half thinking about the stuffed humans case. Therefore his entire night was spent in pain - he wouldn't ever be able to fall asleep, no matter how hard he tried or how exhausted he felt.

It was as if he had been cursed by some sort of demon who wanted to prevent him from sleeping. His mind wandered back to a piece of mythology he had read over a while ago, something that certainly seemed to apply to him now.

The Nocnitsa, the night hag. She would sit on one's chest and draw out their life energy as long as they slept on their back - sleeping with the dead. Then, of course, she feeded off of human darkness, sadness, pain, terror.

The only way to rid oneself of the Nocnitsa would be to fight back.

And the only way Will knew how to fight back was to get Molly to help.

But in the middle of the day, Will wasn't going to go over to St. Bart's and request that Molly come home so that he could nap. No - there were other things of far more importance to be done, and he couldn't allow himself to forget that.

There was the matter that he spent half of his night pondering over the stuffed humans case - in order to put those fears to rest, he would have to head over to 221B and find out precisely what was going on with it all.

After seeing the crime scene, it became far more clear why this was all taking place. The criminal wasn't stuffing the humans out of some deep desire to have "friends" or anything of the sort. No, they were mocking their victims. Instead of leaving them to be normal bodies, they were turned into something akin to a children's toy, something meant to resemble a beast.

He could see this when he examined the scene where the body had been - aside from several traces of thread, there wasn't much else to be found. While others would put this down as being a complete lack of evidence, Will saw it to be just as telling as anything else. It didn't need anything else. It was just a toy, a useless shell stuffed up with nothing special, strewn across the floor and forgotten.

Then, of course, there was the body itself - he still hadn't seen it. He wasn't sure if he even cared to see it to begin with. Every time he would stare across the stitching he would find himself wondering precisely how it would feel to push the needle into the skin, and then pull out - push and pull, push and pull, push and pull...

These were the precise types of thoughts that ended up keeping him awake all night. He just needed to figure out this case and head back to America. Molly would come along with him, they would get married, and it could all be pushed to the past. It was just a matter of getting through another day, and another day, and another day.

One day in the not-so-very-distant future he could see himself being legitimately happy. It would be true happiness, he was sure of it. It was these sorts of thoughts that allowed him to make it to another orange streaked sunset and wake up to another foggy dawn. People often underestimated the simple power of hope, of course - Will himself underestimated it. He just didn't consider what he felt to be hope.

For now, however, all he could think of doing was taking a ride over to 221B Baker Street and attempting to get the case worked out for the day. If he could do any sort of work, then he knew he'd be able to rest just that tiniest bit easier. He could know that something was being done to find the killer and stop them from killing any more.