Chapter Text
“Mr. Graham?”
Alana Bloom tried to keep her voice even and light, pushing down the nervous tremor that threatened to spill forth. A pale mixture of moonlight and streetlamp fluorescents poured through the crack in the scratchy hotel curtains. Half illuminated by its glow stood a stranger, although can you call someone a stranger after you have shared a drink with them at a seedy downtown bar at 2 a.m. and end up in their hotel room?
Alana let her eyes wander over the shape his face cut against the window, the furrow of his brow and the distance in his gaze and thought he was the kind of man that could tell you everything about his life, his childhood to what brought him standing before her, and she would never be able to say with confidence that she ‘knew’ him.
“Will.” The soft timbre of his voice startled her in the quietness of the room. This late at night the city outside slept fitfully but this high up they could have been the only two people in the world.
“Will.” She repeated back to him, unsure the name suited him at all. It felt so soft and even childlike. To her it did not match the intensity of which he had spoken to her at the bar. But since then he had shifted, drawn inwards slightly and the mask he’d worn, and she knew it was a mask, had changed shape to reveal something colder and yet more vulnerable. Alana was accustomed to dealing with vulnerable people. This was something else, not yearning for comfort, but a dangerous animal trapped in a corner, leg broken but with its teeth bared in a snarl. To say she was uneasy would be an understatement. Yet she was rooted to her seat with almost unbearable curiosity.
“Do you have one of those recording…devices?” Will chose his words very carefully, she could tell by the cadence of his voice as he spoke just now and earlier at the bar. It wasn’t stilted per say, but there was intention behind every word, bordering on rehearsed. Alana smiled softly at the question.
“I usually just use my phone, actually.” She pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket as she spoke and placed it face up on the glass coffee table that sat between them. Will hummed in response and finally turned away from the window to take the seat to her side. He shied away from making direct eye contact but when he did Alana caught sight of his deep blue almost black eyes and she felt relief when he would flick his gaze away again. Will sat with cat-like grace on the armchair with his knees slightly apart to give the appearance of being relaxed and his arms laid out flat beside him. He made a noise like a sigh, but this too was a fabrication, another mask, a different one, not so obscured as it was at the bar earlier that night but still firmly in place.
“I’m used to being asked questions when being interviewed.” Will’s tone was blunt but not unkind and Alana gave what she hoped was another disarming smile.
“As you said earlier, this isn’t a formal interview as I’m not a reporter.” A small smile quirked the corner of his lips. He was handsome, Alana could admit that to herself at the very least, it was why she had let him buy her a drink in the first place. She liked the cut of his jaw and the dark stubble he’d let grow there and the strength in his shoulders underneath his coat. His skin was ghostly white, at least his face was, since the rest was covered by a scarf and black leather gloves that he had yet to take off since coming into the heated room.
“Are you cold still?” She asked and Will twitched with one of those smiles again, like she had referenced an inside joke that she was not a part of.
“Almost always.” He said. He obviously took that to mean she felt uncomfortable because he started to untwine his scarf from his neck, revealing a smooth white throat and a vicious red scar about three fingers wide just below his ear. Alana felt rude with her intense need to stare at it, but she could not look away from it either. When she did draw her gaze away Will had taken off his gloves and placed them neatly on the table, watching her watching him the entire time.
“Why did you say yes to speaking with me, Miss Bloom?” He kept his coat on for now, mirroring her, which she found interesting.
“Alana.” Another smirk and a small nod of acquiescence. “I said yes for purely selfish reasons. You have a story to tell, and I would like to be the one to hear it.”
“And publish it.” He added in.
“That is still to be decided.” She crossed her legs and waited keenly to see if he would eventually do the same.
“I’ve read your books.” Alana knew this, he had revealed he knew who she was after their first drink together. “They all have a very consistent theme. I’m interested as to why you would entertain publishing something that your readers could find…difficult to swallow.”
“Why because you’re not an incarcerated serial killer?” Alana smiled and tilted her head, hoping to come across friendly and un-accusing. It was true, her audience were the kind of people to listen to true crime podcasts on the way to work and reveled in the horror of the idea that ‘monsters’ walked among them. The opportunity laid before her to rewrite how her audience saw the world entirely. Whether she believed Mr. Graham or not didn’t matter, what mattered is if her readers did, and if she could make them understand him.
“I was incarcerated once in a mental hospital.” He said plainly and at her raised eyebrows he continued. “When I was much younger, I killed a man in self defence. It is what I did to him after that landed me there.” Alana had not started recording yet and her eye flicked to her phone sitting on the table and itched to grab it, but she waited.
“That’s not what you wanted to speak to me about though was it? That’s not the story you want to tell?” Will sighed and crossed his legs. Alana fought back a smile out of politeness.
“No, I suppose it doesn’t have much influence on who I became later in life now that you mention it. I barely remember it at all if I’m honest.”
“How old were you when you were hospitalized?” She asked.
“I was twenty-eight.” A crease formed between Alana’s brows.
“I thought you said you were much younger?”
“Yes, I was.” Will settled fully into the armchair now, but she wouldn’t say he relaxed into it, more like he was preparing himself.
“How old are you now?” She could feel something building in the air around them. Will gave a long pause before he spoke again.
“Thirty-five.” He said and this time caught her gaze fully. Alan felt frozen in her seat. She swallowed back the sudden dryness in her throat.
“And when did you turn thirty-five?” Will’s face did not even twitch at the question but his eyes seemed to grow darker and deeper the longer she looked at them. She blinked, and so did he.
“I turned thirty-five on June 30th 1872, and that morning was the last sunrise I ever saw.” Silence hung heavy for a moment.
“Perhaps you would like to start recording now, Miss Bloom.” He did not phrase it like a question. She leaned forward and pressed record.
“Tell me about the last sunrise.”