Season 1 Epilogue

Welcome to Westville.

Chapter 45

“We done here?”

Lochlear sat back in his chair, fiddled with his glasses and reared his back squinting, reminding Casey a little of his father—a rare humanization of the man whom he so far saw as an unfeeling fastidious bureaucrat. The stark interview room hummed faintly with the ambient buzz of fluorescent lights and the low drone of HVAC.

“I believe so,” said Lochlear finally. “I’ll draw up a few more things for you to sign and then we’ll get you on your way. I appreciate your cooperation.”

“Wasn’t exactly how I planned to spend New Year’s Eve, but sure.”

Lochlear stood, taking off his glasses, turning toward the interview room door. “Oh one more thing,” he said.

“Forgot to ask me my favorite color? Childhood snack?”

A rare smirk ghosted across Lochlear’s face. “Agent Reeves will be taking up a post in the Westville area for the next several months. She’ll be your new contact.”

Casey’s fist clenched. He wasn’t exactly surprised. Given the way the interviews had gone and everything that Lochlear had outlined, he knew this was coming. That the D.C.B. would want to keep a close eye on Westville. Casey had just hoped maybe there’d be some breathing room. But things had changed. Westville had changed.

“Right. I’ll be sure to await her beck and call.”

“Nothing like that. With an event of this nature we need ensure there’s not another incursion. Often with leyline anomalies of this nature there can be— let’s call them, aftershocks.”

Casey straightened, narrowing his eyes. “What kind of aftershocks?”

Lochlear hesitated, as though weighing what he could share. “Residual energy. Fluctuations. Sometimes... gaps between realities that shouldn’t exist. The portal you entered was just the beginning.”

Casey scoffed. “Portal? That was a pipe in a tunnel.”

Lochlear’s gaze hardened. “It was a portal, Officer. The tunnel you walked through didn’t lead you to a local silo. It transported you over 1,000 miles to a Janus Global facility in an undisclosed location.”

Casey stared at him, the words sinking like lead. “You’re telling me... the whole time we were down there we were—?”

“Not in Westville,” Lochlear confirmed. “The facility was a leyline-linked hub for dimensional research. We conducted a raid after Millie was recovered, but Janus Global had already cleared out. They powered down the leylines and abandoned the site.”

“Heiser was right about all of it,” Casey breathed.

“He usually is,” said Lochlear.

“So I take it he’s being reinstated?”

“We’ll see,” Lochlear’s expression remained neutral. “Need to know basis, Benson.”

When Lochlear stepped out, the ambient done of the HVAC and the faint sizzle of the white lights overhead was all there was. Casey put his head in his hands. There were moments of lucidity here and there, where he was able to be place the events of the last months in some kind order that made sense. But often, it all felt like a surreal fever dream. A nightmare—the kind that you woke up from only to find traces and threads of it hidden in the corners of your mind in the waking hours, manifesting like ghostly apparitions.

Another agent came in, slid papers over the table and Casey signed the disclosures. At this point he had given up asking too many questions. One thing he’d learned is that the Bureau was going to have their way, and that they held more sway in matters than any FBI he’d ever interacted with. When Casey stepped out into the hall, he was led out to reception, the big open windows to the Chicago skyline blasting him with gray-white daylight, a cover of cloud sailing over Lake Michigan. He spotted Lochlear down the hall, who gave the slightest of nods. Casey waved like you would at the end of some awkward encounter with an old high school ex.

That made him think of Aly and he couldn’t help an ironic smile as he breathed a laugh through his nose and started down the hall toward the elevator. Things weren’t settled with them, with whatever they were, but after everything they were closer, and they were better. Maybe there’d be something to it still after all.

Casey pressed the down button, illuminating pale yellow and watched the ascending red digital numbers, with growing intent. He felt his body tense and looked away.

“Officer,” said a familiar, brash voice. Agent Sarah Reeves was walking briskly toward him, catching up down the hall.

“Thought I had at least a day until I heard from you,” Casey said.

“Lochlear filled you in. Good. I’ll be needing your cooperation moving forward as a liaison to the department.”

“Sure,” Casey said. “First things first, we need to our department together.”

“How is Chief Hart?”, she asked.

“Forced into an overdue retirement.”

Reeves frowned and her tan face growing pale. “He didn’t make it then.”

“Bad phrasing,” Casey said quickly, catching himself. “He’s ok. Just was the push he needed to pass the reins. Reynolds is taking things on for now.”

Reeves nodded. “Well for what it’s worth you wouldn’t be a bad fit.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Casey said, the elevator dinging behind him. “Guess I’ll be seeing you, Reeves.”

“Sooner than you’d like, I’d say.”

Casey stepped inside, and watched Reeves walk away as the doors shut.

The drive back to Westville from Chicago was one Casey had made plenty of times. Coming back as always a strange cocktail of relief mingling with the reluctant dread previously born of seeing people he didn’t want to see or being reminded of the reasons he had wanted out in the first place. But now, he found himself pressing the pedal down harder and speeding like he was immune to all those allergic reactions. He needed to get back. Want wasn’t the word. And that small bit of social dread was now the creeping kind, the feeling that something would happen again and keep happening.

Aftershocks, Lochlear had called him. He couldn’t afford to check out and abandon the town now. Least of all, the people in it he cared about most.

When he pulled across the bridge north of town over Iron River, the rigid metal downspouts and ribbed siloes of PRINCE Milling gleamed in the cold gray light of New Year’s Day. A crane stood motionless and abandoned, staged to remove the half-shattered sign and tend to the damage done. The official story was that Joe Thompson had gotten into an altercation with workers at the Mill. That he’d killed Ethan Crawley. The explosion at Fischer’s was being pitched as purely coincidental and accidental. An electrical fire sparked by Christmas lights serendipitously breaking out and spreading to the kitchen, grease and propane accelerants for the inferno.

Casey would have liked to think that people were smart enough to see through all of that but couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe Lochlear was right.

“Truth is relative, and people will believe what’s most palatable. Until they are presented with irrefutable evidence. It’s the D.C.B’s job to make sure that evidence stays undisclosed. People just aren’t ready.”

Casey turned onto main street, cruising west on M-12. The lumber yard, gas stations and pizza joints he’d passed ad nauseum. The same old town with a brand-new set of problems, seen and unseen. Before he turned up the hill for Aly’s place, he stopped at the red light and glanced over to the sign on his left on the corner.

‘Welcome to Westville,’ est. 1831

“There’s no going back to way things were, Benson,” he recalled Lochlear saying.

“Maybe,” Casey had replied. “But you can be damn sure one thing won’t change.”

“And what’s that?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good. I think the town may need you.”

A car honked behind him, and Casey pressed the gas.

When Casey pulled into the Fischer’s driveway, he felt the tension slowly begin to uncoil in his gut.

He stepped out of the car and into the bitter January air. Before he got to the front door, it opened, and standing there was none other than Liv Fischer. She looked at Casey with knowing green eyes. They’d seen too much together for there not to be an unspoken understanding between them.

“Aly wasn’t sure you’d come,” she said, matter of fact. “Never one to miss a party.”

Olivia snorted. “Could have fooled me.”

“Liv, who is it?” Aly stopped when she got to the door. They hadn’t seen each other since Christmas Eve morning when after getting cleared by the medical teams on sight following the explosion at the Cafe Casey had been ordered to Chicago for immediate debriefing courtesy of Lochlear, and Casey promptly had told him to screw himself before wising up to the fact that he preferred not be taken into custody.

“You’re back.” Aly breathed.

“Yea. Feds finally had enough of me I guess.”

There was a silent pause between them, Liv glancing back and forth.

“Well, I’m going to leave you two alone. Mil is waiting for me to start the movie.”

Casey’s felt his throat tighten.

“Millie’s here?”, he asked, as Liv walked back inside. Aly nodded. “Erin asked if she could stay here a while. With everything going on and preparations for the funeral it seemed best.”

Casey craned his neck inside, saw the back of Millie’s blonde curls as Liv sat back down beside her friend on the couch.

“Has she… said anything?”

Aly shook her head. “Nothing new. The doctor’s checked her out and gave her the all clear. Did a psych eval too.”

Something told Casey a shrink wouldn’t help. Not after what she’d seen. What they’d all seen.

“You coming in?”, asked Aly.

Casey nodded and stepped inside. He walked into the kitchen, greeting Kathy along the way, and turned to see Millie standing there. Beneath her blue eyes hung darkened rungs, her face thin and her sweatshirt billowing over her slight frame. Casey swallowed the collected burden of the past months, not knowing what to say. There was nothing that would bring any justice to what she endured—even if she blessedly didn’t remember much of her ordeal.

“Hey nut-case,” she said, voice raspy.

“Keep calling me that,” he said, “And I just might start to believe it.”

She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him. She felt paper thin and feather light, but he knew that just like him there was so much more under the surface weighing down dark and heavy.

Just like him. But she was here. She was safe.

When Casey let her go and watched her sit back down on the couch next to Millie, he felt the worry, weight and guilt pull away from him too. If just for a moment, he felt what it was like to be free of all that. And he was. Almost.

He turned toward Aly.

“Hey, I’m sorry. There’s something I need to do.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yea sure.”

“But I’ll be back. Promise.”

She offered a thin smile as he headed for the door, grabbing his coat on the way out.

Andy and Deb Hopkins still lived in the same house, on the hill of Forest st.

Casey got out of his car, breathed warm air into his hands and tried to stop himself from shaking. This had been a long time coming.

He knocked, and waited. And when Deb answered the door, visibly confused as to who he must be and what he could possibly be there to sell on New Year’s Day, he said:

“Mrs. Hopkins. My name is Casey Benson. I wanted to talk to you about your son.”

Chapter 46

Late that night, the Fischer household was silent, blanketed by the cold, quiet dark. Millie slipped out of bed, her bare feet brushing against the cool floor. She walked right past Olivia, who likely, was snoring like the dead.

But she couldn’t hear anything except the growing rush of blood in her ears and the hiss of static clawing at the edges of her mind. Beneath it, faint but growing, came the familiar, terrible groan—the sound of a thousand bones bending, creaking, breaking.

Her movements were mechanical, each step carrying her forward without her consent. She drifted through the Fischer’s living room, her gaze unfocused and distant. Her hand trembled as she reached out to the front door, gripping the cold metal knob. Slowly, she turned it, the latch clicking in the stillness. The door cracked open, and icy air rushed in, biting against her skin and seeping to the marrow.

The night stretched before her, the spiking branches of the trees clawing at the starlit sky. Her breath rose in puffs of vapor, encasing her face in ghostly mist. Millie drew in a slow, shuddering breath, the cold air slicing down her throat like a blade. She stepped out onto the sidewalk, her feet burning against the frigid concrete.

Then she saw it.

At the edge of the tree line, the air shimmered, rippling and folding like waves over pavement on a blistering summer day. It pooled and twisted, colors shifting in iridescent hues, mesmerizing and wrong. At its center, a red glow pulsed—a deep, searing crimson, alive and malevolent. The glow seemed to throb in time with the blood pounding in her ears.

Her lips parted as if to speak, but no sound came out. The hissing static swelled, filling her mind until it drowned out everything else.

Millie shot upright in bed, her chest heaving, cold sweat clinging to her skin. The room was dark and still. For a moment, she could only sit there, frozen, her fingers gripping the blanket as she tried to calm her breathing. The dream clung to her, vivid and oppressive, like a shadow that refused to fade.

She glanced toward the couch just outside the bedroom. Olivia was sprawled across it, snoring softly, utterly undisturbed. A dream, Millie told herself. Just another nightmare.

She sat on the edge of the bed, running her hands over her face, her fingers brushing against the scars on her forearms. Her gaze lingered on them—thin, pockmarked trails where the needles had pierced her skin again and again. And then there was the thicker, jagged scar. The one that no one would tell her the truth about. They’d tried to hide it, but she knew. She remembered.

She remembered the tears streaking her father’s face. The tremble in his hands. The crimson sheen in his eyes as he turned away.

A shiver ran through her, and she glanced up sharply. That’s when she heard it.

The hissing.

It started low, faint, as if coming from somewhere far off. But it was there, unmistakable, threading through the silence. Her pulse quickened as the sound grew louder, more insistent. Millie stood, her movements hesitant, and stepped into the bathroom. She reached for the light switch.

Millie’s breath hitched as the hissing grew louder, drowning out her thoughts. She gripped the sink harder, her knuckles whitening. She forced herself to look back into the mirror, hoping it was just a trick of the light, the stress, or her imagination playing cruel games.

But the red glow in her reflection didn’t fade. It sharpened and stared back, unblinking, the glowing red orbs fixed on her as a single tear streaked down the cheek, and she felt its warm trail.

Her mirrored image leaned closer, the glowing eyes brighter now, vivid and alive, filled with an unnatural hunger. It wasn’t just her reflection anymore. The air in the bathroom thickened, a suffocating weight pressing down on her chest as frost crept along the mirror’s edges, spreading like veins. Her heart pounded in her ears.

Behind her, the bathroom light flickered. The snowstorm outside rattled the windowpane, the sound like fingernails scraping against glass. And then it stopped. The wind, the rattling—everything. The silence was so sudden, so complete, it was like the world itself had paused, holding its breath.

Millie’s reflection didn’t move. But she did.

She staggered back from the sink, her pulse racing, her legs weak beneath her. She turned toward the window, drawn by something she couldn’t name. Outside, the snow swirled in strange patterns, unnatural and deliberate, twisting upward in spiraling tendrils like smoke from an unseen fire. The darkened shapes of the trees bent unnaturally against the wind’s pull, bowing as though to some unseen force.

And then came the whisper—a faint, sibilant murmur that wasn’t just in her ears but in her head.

Millie’s knees gave out, and she sank to the floor. She glanced back at the mirror one last time, her reflection still staring, still glowing, its lips curling into a faint, knowing smile.

The frost on the glass cracked, a sharp sound that echoed in oppressive stillness, s the light went out.