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Part Two
He’d been at the library until it closed for two days running. Classes at school had passed in a daze and he skipped out during free period. Nothing. There didn’t seem to be much information, a hint here, a whisper there, but nothing definite. The fear that his father and brother were actually just crazy constantly gnawed at his gut and occupied his thoughts. The Internet was his last hope in finding anything. He waited impatiently until Dad and Dean went to bed, waited until Dean’s breathing evened out, and then crept back out to the living room to turn on the family computer.
Yahoo.
Google.
AskJeeves.
Wikipedia.
Altavista.
The search engines were endless and he threw any key word he could think of into them. For the past three days, every time he’d thought of one, he’d grabbed a scrap of paper, written it down, and shoved it in his pocket. The computer desk was covered in a scribbled multi-coloured confetti of high school paper, blue and green and pink and white and gray and even some orange from art class.
Around three a. m., he started to find sites and pages that looked promising. They began to suggest that maybe his family hadn’t taken the final dive off the deep end, but were onto something. At first, he’d just found pages on different types of monsters, some from classic horror films and some from medieval bestiaries and some even from the Koran and Book of Enoch. There were some self proclaimed ghost and demon and vampire hunters who would exorcise your house or stake your stalker for no small fee, but there were other pages, too, and these reminded Sam a bit of Dean and a bit of Dad and a bit of the strangers his primary school teachers warned him about.
They were simple sites, with lots of text and almost no pictures. The pictures that were features were mostly poorly scanned, grainy woodcuts or links to famous paintings. They frightened him a bit; these people seemed like gruff men and women more familiar with guns and books than other people, but they also gave him some hope. Maybe Dean and Dad weren’t crazy. Maybe Dean was right. Of course, that was a frightening thought, too, but there was a comfort in being able to rely wholeheartedly upon his brother.
Then, stumbling through a half-read site in the pitch darkness of the room, he came across one written by a man who claimed to have met several of these people, that they saved him from something he described as, “a terrible, flesh-eating monster” which the people had killed. The site said that he was looking for other people who had had similar experiences, who had been saved from near-death-by-the-supernatural. He listed the names of the three people who had worked in conjunction to save him and then talked about them and their lives as best he could.
However, he assured his reader that these were people best left on their own. He warned that they were loners, dangerous, and potentially deadly if toyed with. He wrote that he only talked about them in the hopes of finding other people who would believe him. It gave Sam a shiver until he head, halfway down the page, that one of the men, a Jim, had talked about a Robert Singer who ran a salvage yard as a good source for both books and guns. It was a brief reference and quickly passed over in favour of a discussion of rock salt versus sea salt.
Sam stared at the screen for a long moment, connecting, slowly, a dangerous stranger with the family photograph hanging in the hallway behind him. Half asleep, he pulled up Altavista and plugged, “Singer Auto Salvage” into the search engine. It pulled up a Singer Auto Parts in Nebraska and a couple of other places, one in South Dakota and two others in Wyoming. He sighed and refined his search to, “Singer Auto Salvage + Robert Singer.” This time, all of the hits were for the place in South Dakota. There were a couple of people recommending it for some hard to find old auto parts and a cheap tow for wrecked cars, but the first page also pulled up a telephone number. There was no website. Grabbing a pen, Sam quickly wrote down the number on a scrap of green paper before shutting down the computer and crawling back into bed.
*
Sam sat on the bleachers behind the school, theoretically watching Kelly and Tara practicing softball, but mostly staring at his cell phone. When Dean had been at college and Sam started driving, Dad had bought him a cell phone, with a firm warning not to run up the bill and to keep it on his person in case of emergencies. He was fairly sure that calling Robert Singer of South Dakota would not constitute an emergency in his father’s eyes and would probably run up the phone bill with it being a long distance call. But this was important, his instinct protested. This could be the answer to his questions. It could be more than what was Dad was hiding and Dean only half knew.
Before he could convince himself that it was a bad idea, Sam dialed the number and let it ring.
“Singer Auto Salvage,” a gruff voice announced, picking up after the third ring. “Salvage, towing, and repair. Bobby speaking.”
Sam felt as though his tongue were locked in his throat and he just breathed raggedly into the phone.
“Who is this?”
“This- this is Sam,” Sam said, stumbling over his words like a complete idiot. “I got your number on the Internet.”
“Looking for a junk car to fix up?” Bobby asked. “Or did your junk break down on 85?”
“I - ah - 85?”
“Highway 85?” Bobby sounded a little exasperated.
“Where’s that?”
“Listen, kid, I don’t have time for this. I’ve got a busy schedule. What do you want?”
Sam breathed into the phone. “I - ah - “
“I’ve got cars to fix. Who is this?”
Sam gripped the cold metal of the bleachers with his left hand and prayed to a God in which he didn’t believe that this would work. “I’m, um, Sam Winchester and, um -”
“Winchester?” Bobby interrupted. Sam began to think that he was lucky Bobby was willing to handle most of the conversation. “Any relation to John Winchester?”
“Uh, he’s my dad? Look -”
“SAM Winchester?” Bobby asked into the phone from somewhere in South Dakota.
“Yeah?”
“Damn, I thought you were dead, son, with that shtriga back in ‘89. Something come up with your father? He went deep like he was trained for it. Your brother was too old for it, so I figured the damned thing must have gotten you.”
“I - what?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, as though Bobby thought better of saying anything.
“Mr. Singer?”
“Call me Bobby,” the gruff voice told him. “You boys always called me Uncle Bobby. Is your dad okay, son? What about your brother?”
“Yeah. I mean, I think so. He’s just working at the garage today. And Dean’s supposed to pick me up in about an hour and no one’s called, so I think they’re okay.”
There was another long pause on the other end of the line and Sam thought he could hear the rustle of paper across the phone lines, from South Dakota to Massachusetts.
“Mr. Singer? Uh, Bobby? You still there?” Sam tightened his grip on the bleachers, feeling the cold steel dig into the fleshy part of his palm. On the field, Kelly waved up at him from the outfield. He pretended to be engrossed in his cell phone conversation.
“Why are you calling me?” Bobby asked after a long moment. “If your daddy and your brother are in good health and you’re, what, twenty now, I don’t see what I can help you with unless you’ve got an army of undead on your hands - and it don’t sound like you do - or your car’s broke down near Spearfish.”
Sam frowned against the phone. “I just - you knew my dad, right, when I was little and Dean was just a kid? We’ve got a picture of your place up at the house. It’s why I called you.”
“Yeah,” Bobby agreed noncommittally.
“Well…” Sam paused a long moment and looked at the girls playing on the muddy field. Spring was coming slowly to New England, the trees and flowers still stunted and gold-green with the dull brick of the school and clapboard houses stark and sharp against the brown and gold nature. He took a deep breath. He would tell this Mr. Singer what was going on. The worst case scenario was that he was a mechanic Dad had known years ago and, really, Sam hadn’t known his name until he found it on the Internet and some guy from Nowheresville, South Dakota couldn’t get him in trouble with Dad and Dean. “There’s this thing. It’s a problem. And, um, I’ve done some reading and stuff and I think it’s, like, a supernatural problem. And the Internet site, it maybe said that you’re kind of helpful with that kind of thing.”
“Reading and stuff?”
“Um,” Sam stalled. “It really wouldn’t have occurred to me, you know, supernatural stuff like monsters or ghosts or things, but Dad, it turns out, has a ton of books on it, you know, besides the ones in Dean’s stash. And I think they’re both kind of scared of whatever it is because Dean’s dumping salt everywhere and I found a blessed holding circle from the Greater Key of Solomon under the welcome mat.”
“Under the welcome mat?”
“Yeah. It was done in chalk, but it was holding up pretty good because, you know, under the mat and everything. But I’ve been reading stuff - you know, on the Internet and other stuff, too, like The Devil in New England and Pseudomonarchia Daemonum and anything I can find, even the weird stuff Dean has - and I figure, there are people out there who just, you know, get rid of this stuff. Instead of just making everyone in town think we’re getting ready for winter early by buying all the road salt. And then I found your name and figured it must be your place in our picture and then I called you.” Sam took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Even though he had managed to rationalise all of it in his head between the books and Dean, saying everything out loud just made it sound like a one way ticket to Crazytown all over again.
“Your dad hasn’t gone after it yet?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so. He hasn’t gone out there anyway. We’ve just been staying in town or, well, I guess Dad’s been going into Fitchburg for work, but that’s totally in the opposite direction and I figure you need specialised weapons and stuff to go after these things. Dean says he thinks guns ought to work on anything, but I don’t think so. I mean, Cotton Mather talks about some really freaky stuff and these medieval writers, I don’t know if I’ve got crappy translations or what, but they’re talking about holy wars and blessings and some freaky church crap that I don’t think Pastor Amy would really like that much.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, so long that Sam began to think that he’d been confessing his thoughts to a junkyard mechanic from South Dakota, but then Bobby began to speak slowly. “You’re just figuring this stuff out on your own, son? Looking at things on the Internet and borrowing John’s books? Your dad and your brother didn’t teach you anything? You really should be asking them. John was one of the best there was.”
“No. Last time I talked to Dean, he tried to tell me that maybe Dad did this kind of thing way back, before we moved out here and I started school. But I don’t really remember anything before Fitchburg, but I figure Dad’s not talking about it even if he did do it and Dean’s -" Sam paused for a moment and caught his breathe. He realised in the back of his head that was babbling nervously, but he couldn't help it. "He’s teaching me how to use a gun and we’re both reading the books, but he kind of freaked out when I said we should talk to some other people because that’s kind of what got him into this mess, but I think that if we just pay attention to who we talk to and don’t go blathering to random people, we should be fine. Right?”
“Fitchburg?” Bobby asked. “You’re up in Wisconsin? I went looking for your dad there when you all went off the radar. Damn, I didn’t think he was that good.”
“Massachusetts. We’re in Massachusetts.” He paused and then asked in a small voice, “I’m not crazy, am I? I mean, I want to believe Dean and the books say he’s right. But…”
“But the folks in town are giving you a wide berth even though they’ve been your friends all your life and you’re beginning to wonder if all of this is leaving a mark on your face?”
“Yeah.”
“No, son. You’re not crazy and neither is your brother.” There was a crash of metal behind Bobby’s voice. “Look, Sam, is this a safe line?”
“What?”
“Can I call you back about this later? On this line?”
“Uh, yeah. It’s my cell phone. I’ll just keep it on.”
*
“What’s with you?” Dean asked sharply, closing the bedroom door behind him. “Dad thinks you’re doing drugs or something. I had to convince him not to test your urine.”
“What?” Sam looked up from his copy of Thaumatographia Pneumatica.
Dean collapsed on his bed and glared at Sam. “Listen to that. He’s playing one of Mom’s old Sinatra records, not Zeppelin or Metallica. You have him seriously freaked. What the Hell is up with you?”
“What do you mean?” Sam closed the book, marking his page with a sticky note and tried to remember acting oddly or drugged. He’d had the revealing, but frustrating conversation with Mr. Singer during the girls’ softball practice. Kelly had teased him afterward about having a mysterious girlfriend until Dean picked him up, the old fashioned growl of the Impala’s engine letting everyone at the fields know that Sam was leaving. When he’d come home, he’d helped himself to Dean’s ever growing collection of esoteric books, weeding through them until he found the ones he had seen referenced online. When Dad came home from the garage and washed off the engine grease, Sam and Dean threw the left over brisket and potatoes into the microwave. Then they’d eaten dinner. He couldn’t see anything odd about his behavior.
“Are you fucking with me?” Dean propped himself up on his arm to better glare at his brother.
Sam frowned. “What?”
“Jesus. You just took off the other night - and I know you were freaked, man, but running off like that is not cool; I thought Dad was going to kill me. I mean, he came home and you’re not here and no one knows where the hell you are. And then you don’t talk to us for days, acting like we’ve got leprosy or something, looking like you haven’t slept in a year. And then you come home tonight and act like, I don’t know, you’re all happy and helpful and shit.”
“So,” Sam said slowly, “you guys think I’m on drugs because I’m happy and helped with dinner.”
“Dude, I think you’re just nuts.” Dean shrugged. “Dad thinks you’re taking uppers because you went from Emo McTeenageangst for a month and a half to suddenly being Happy McFamilyman over night. I told Dad you probably finally got laid.”
“You didn’t.”
“No, I actually didn’t. But, seriously, what’s going on? You get a hot date?”
Sam frowned and tried to forget the look on Kelly’s face when she told him how her dad had forbidden her to go to prom with him. “No.” He paused and thought a moment. “But I’ve been doing some research.”
“And you’re finally okay with living in the crazy house?”
“I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“Sam, I know the look I saw on your face before you took off the other night.” Dean sighed. “It’s okay. Most people would agree with you, anyway.”
“No, I really don’t,” Sam protested. “Look, I called this guy and he says you’re right, about the freaky stuff and about Dad and - ”
“You called someone?”
“What was I supposed to do?” Sam gripped the Thaumatographia Pneumatica tightly. “I read the books. I even looked online. But I need to talk to someone who could give me real answers.”
“And I couldn’t?” Dean’s voice was sharp. “Who was it? Who did you call?”
“I found him online. His name is Bobby Singer. He runs Singer Auto Salvage, like in the picture. He says he knew Dad, knew us.”
“You found Uncle Bobby?”
“Yeah.” Sam nodded. “You know him?”
“Sure. I mean, I haven’t seen him since we moved out here, but when we were kids, we stayed with him all the time. Just… How did you find him? And don’t you know that’s dangerous?”
“I just found him online. It wasn’t that hard to find,” he lied. “And I figured we might have known him.”
Dean just stared at him. “You figured?”
Sam shrugged. “I needed some answers.”
“And did you get them?”
“He said we’re not crazy.” Sam looked back down at his book. “He thought I was dead, when I first told him who I was.”
“What?”
“He said that we - you and me and Dad - just disappeared after something… a stiga?” Sam’s long fingers traced the cover of the Thaumatographia Pneumatica. “He said he thought I died, that that’s why you and Dad just disappeared.”
Dean paled, his skin milky white under freckles, but he didn’t say anything.
“What happened? Is that why I started school late? What happened that made Dad stop all of this?” Sam waved his hand broadly over the books in their room and the holy water and wood and salt hidden between their beds. “Mr. Singer said that Dad was good at this, was the best.”
Dean reached for the cast bronze head that hung around his neck, a nervous habit. “It’s called a shtriga, with an ‘r.’ And Dad, he killed it. It was dead. It died on my bed.”
“It died in your bed?”
“Yeah. I didn’t sleep there anyway.” Dean shrugged and closed his fist around the pendant. “You really want to know?”
“Yeah.” Sam bit his lower lip, thinking for a moment. “I think I do.”
“We were up in Fort Douglas, in Wisconsin. You weren’t even in school and I was playing hooky more than attending. Dad figured I was a better babysitter than anybody else would be, not that we had the money anyway. He was hunting it. It goes after kids, you know? And they were dying. I was too old for it. It’s like Disney World - when you’re ten, you’re an adult. I don’t know. I left you alone.” Dean stared at his knees. “It was just for a couple of minutes, I swear. But… It got in. Dad took it down before I even got back.”
“What happened?”
“You were down for the count. I thought you were dead… that I’d killed you, leaving you in the motel like that. Dad told me to grab our stuff, that we were leaving, He grabbed you and put you in the front seat. We didn’t stop until we were in Illinois, stayed at a hotel there for three days. Dad wouldn’t even let me watch you anymore. Couldn’t trust me. He waited by your bed, waited for you to wake up, and made a lot of phone calls from the room.” Dean frowned, lines etched into his face. “Some people came by - people I didn’t know. They came to look at you and give Dad some books.”
“People?”
Dean shrugged sharply. “Healers? Hunters? I didn’t know. All I know is you weren’t waking up, weren’t doing anything. After three days, we started moving east: Ohio and then New York. You woke up in the car between Canadaigua and Fitchburg. I thought Dad was going to drive off the road. I almost had a freaking heart attack in the back seat. I’d figured that you were like the kids we left back in Wisconsin, that you were dying. And you just fucking yawned and told Dad you were hungry.” Dean swallowed audibly. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so happy in my life.”
“And Dad just stopped? I… got attacked by something and he just stopped?”
“You didn’t just get attacked. You almost died. I don’t know what Dad would have done if you hadn’t woken up.”
Sam stared at Dean. He wasn’t used to Dean being so serious, couldn’t remember the last time he had seen Dean this upset.
“There was one more hunt after that. I don’t know what it was. We got the apartment in Fitchburg and this time he got us both a babysitter. I think he told her he was looking for a job, but he wasn’t. He came home a couple times bleeding. And then it all just ended. He got the job at the garage, got us into a real school.”
Sam got up and sat next to Dean on his bed, brushing shoulders with him. “And here we are?”
“Yeah.” Dean looked up at him with a bleak smile. “Here we are.”
“So, why don’t I remember that?”
“You were out for a week, Sammy,” Dean said, with some affection. “You were six and basically in a coma. Maybe it was a coma. I did research on it a couple years later. You’re lucky you didn’t have brain damage or something. If I hadn’t just left you there…”
“Dude, you were ten.” Sam wrapped an arm loosely around Dean’s shoulder. “How were you supposed to save me from some coma-inducing shtriga-thing?”
“I had a gun,” Dean protested. “I was supposed to watch you, to save you. It was my job.”
“You were ten,” Sam repeated. “Ten. At ten, I was barely able to take care of goldfish. That’s not fair.”
Dean shrugged again.
“Come on. Admit it, you had to remind me to feed him half the time.”
“I guess so.”
Sam smiled. “Now, weren’t you going to show me some book you found on Muslim demons?”
“Yeah.” Dean seemed to take the peace offering for what it was and began to sort through the books on his side of the room.
Part Four
He’d been at the library until it closed for two days running. Classes at school had passed in a daze and he skipped out during free period. Nothing. There didn’t seem to be much information, a hint here, a whisper there, but nothing definite. The fear that his father and brother were actually just crazy constantly gnawed at his gut and occupied his thoughts. The Internet was his last hope in finding anything. He waited impatiently until Dad and Dean went to bed, waited until Dean’s breathing evened out, and then crept back out to the living room to turn on the family computer.
Yahoo.
Google.
AskJeeves.
Wikipedia.
Altavista.
The search engines were endless and he threw any key word he could think of into them. For the past three days, every time he’d thought of one, he’d grabbed a scrap of paper, written it down, and shoved it in his pocket. The computer desk was covered in a scribbled multi-coloured confetti of high school paper, blue and green and pink and white and gray and even some orange from art class.
Around three a. m., he started to find sites and pages that looked promising. They began to suggest that maybe his family hadn’t taken the final dive off the deep end, but were onto something. At first, he’d just found pages on different types of monsters, some from classic horror films and some from medieval bestiaries and some even from the Koran and Book of Enoch. There were some self proclaimed ghost and demon and vampire hunters who would exorcise your house or stake your stalker for no small fee, but there were other pages, too, and these reminded Sam a bit of Dean and a bit of Dad and a bit of the strangers his primary school teachers warned him about.
They were simple sites, with lots of text and almost no pictures. The pictures that were features were mostly poorly scanned, grainy woodcuts or links to famous paintings. They frightened him a bit; these people seemed like gruff men and women more familiar with guns and books than other people, but they also gave him some hope. Maybe Dean and Dad weren’t crazy. Maybe Dean was right. Of course, that was a frightening thought, too, but there was a comfort in being able to rely wholeheartedly upon his brother.
Then, stumbling through a half-read site in the pitch darkness of the room, he came across one written by a man who claimed to have met several of these people, that they saved him from something he described as, “a terrible, flesh-eating monster” which the people had killed. The site said that he was looking for other people who had had similar experiences, who had been saved from near-death-by-the-supernatural. He listed the names of the three people who had worked in conjunction to save him and then talked about them and their lives as best he could.
However, he assured his reader that these were people best left on their own. He warned that they were loners, dangerous, and potentially deadly if toyed with. He wrote that he only talked about them in the hopes of finding other people who would believe him. It gave Sam a shiver until he head, halfway down the page, that one of the men, a Jim, had talked about a Robert Singer who ran a salvage yard as a good source for both books and guns. It was a brief reference and quickly passed over in favour of a discussion of rock salt versus sea salt.
Sam stared at the screen for a long moment, connecting, slowly, a dangerous stranger with the family photograph hanging in the hallway behind him. Half asleep, he pulled up Altavista and plugged, “Singer Auto Salvage” into the search engine. It pulled up a Singer Auto Parts in Nebraska and a couple of other places, one in South Dakota and two others in Wyoming. He sighed and refined his search to, “Singer Auto Salvage + Robert Singer.” This time, all of the hits were for the place in South Dakota. There were a couple of people recommending it for some hard to find old auto parts and a cheap tow for wrecked cars, but the first page also pulled up a telephone number. There was no website. Grabbing a pen, Sam quickly wrote down the number on a scrap of green paper before shutting down the computer and crawling back into bed.
*
Sam sat on the bleachers behind the school, theoretically watching Kelly and Tara practicing softball, but mostly staring at his cell phone. When Dean had been at college and Sam started driving, Dad had bought him a cell phone, with a firm warning not to run up the bill and to keep it on his person in case of emergencies. He was fairly sure that calling Robert Singer of South Dakota would not constitute an emergency in his father’s eyes and would probably run up the phone bill with it being a long distance call. But this was important, his instinct protested. This could be the answer to his questions. It could be more than what was Dad was hiding and Dean only half knew.
Before he could convince himself that it was a bad idea, Sam dialed the number and let it ring.
“Singer Auto Salvage,” a gruff voice announced, picking up after the third ring. “Salvage, towing, and repair. Bobby speaking.”
Sam felt as though his tongue were locked in his throat and he just breathed raggedly into the phone.
“Who is this?”
“This- this is Sam,” Sam said, stumbling over his words like a complete idiot. “I got your number on the Internet.”
“Looking for a junk car to fix up?” Bobby asked. “Or did your junk break down on 85?”
“I - ah - 85?”
“Highway 85?” Bobby sounded a little exasperated.
“Where’s that?”
“Listen, kid, I don’t have time for this. I’ve got a busy schedule. What do you want?”
Sam breathed into the phone. “I - ah - “
“I’ve got cars to fix. Who is this?”
Sam gripped the cold metal of the bleachers with his left hand and prayed to a God in which he didn’t believe that this would work. “I’m, um, Sam Winchester and, um -”
“Winchester?” Bobby interrupted. Sam began to think that he was lucky Bobby was willing to handle most of the conversation. “Any relation to John Winchester?”
“Uh, he’s my dad? Look -”
“SAM Winchester?” Bobby asked into the phone from somewhere in South Dakota.
“Yeah?”
“Damn, I thought you were dead, son, with that shtriga back in ‘89. Something come up with your father? He went deep like he was trained for it. Your brother was too old for it, so I figured the damned thing must have gotten you.”
“I - what?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, as though Bobby thought better of saying anything.
“Mr. Singer?”
“Call me Bobby,” the gruff voice told him. “You boys always called me Uncle Bobby. Is your dad okay, son? What about your brother?”
“Yeah. I mean, I think so. He’s just working at the garage today. And Dean’s supposed to pick me up in about an hour and no one’s called, so I think they’re okay.”
There was another long pause on the other end of the line and Sam thought he could hear the rustle of paper across the phone lines, from South Dakota to Massachusetts.
“Mr. Singer? Uh, Bobby? You still there?” Sam tightened his grip on the bleachers, feeling the cold steel dig into the fleshy part of his palm. On the field, Kelly waved up at him from the outfield. He pretended to be engrossed in his cell phone conversation.
“Why are you calling me?” Bobby asked after a long moment. “If your daddy and your brother are in good health and you’re, what, twenty now, I don’t see what I can help you with unless you’ve got an army of undead on your hands - and it don’t sound like you do - or your car’s broke down near Spearfish.”
Sam frowned against the phone. “I just - you knew my dad, right, when I was little and Dean was just a kid? We’ve got a picture of your place up at the house. It’s why I called you.”
“Yeah,” Bobby agreed noncommittally.
“Well…” Sam paused a long moment and looked at the girls playing on the muddy field. Spring was coming slowly to New England, the trees and flowers still stunted and gold-green with the dull brick of the school and clapboard houses stark and sharp against the brown and gold nature. He took a deep breath. He would tell this Mr. Singer what was going on. The worst case scenario was that he was a mechanic Dad had known years ago and, really, Sam hadn’t known his name until he found it on the Internet and some guy from Nowheresville, South Dakota couldn’t get him in trouble with Dad and Dean. “There’s this thing. It’s a problem. And, um, I’ve done some reading and stuff and I think it’s, like, a supernatural problem. And the Internet site, it maybe said that you’re kind of helpful with that kind of thing.”
“Reading and stuff?”
“Um,” Sam stalled. “It really wouldn’t have occurred to me, you know, supernatural stuff like monsters or ghosts or things, but Dad, it turns out, has a ton of books on it, you know, besides the ones in Dean’s stash. And I think they’re both kind of scared of whatever it is because Dean’s dumping salt everywhere and I found a blessed holding circle from the Greater Key of Solomon under the welcome mat.”
“Under the welcome mat?”
“Yeah. It was done in chalk, but it was holding up pretty good because, you know, under the mat and everything. But I’ve been reading stuff - you know, on the Internet and other stuff, too, like The Devil in New England and Pseudomonarchia Daemonum and anything I can find, even the weird stuff Dean has - and I figure, there are people out there who just, you know, get rid of this stuff. Instead of just making everyone in town think we’re getting ready for winter early by buying all the road salt. And then I found your name and figured it must be your place in our picture and then I called you.” Sam took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Even though he had managed to rationalise all of it in his head between the books and Dean, saying everything out loud just made it sound like a one way ticket to Crazytown all over again.
“Your dad hasn’t gone after it yet?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so. He hasn’t gone out there anyway. We’ve just been staying in town or, well, I guess Dad’s been going into Fitchburg for work, but that’s totally in the opposite direction and I figure you need specialised weapons and stuff to go after these things. Dean says he thinks guns ought to work on anything, but I don’t think so. I mean, Cotton Mather talks about some really freaky stuff and these medieval writers, I don’t know if I’ve got crappy translations or what, but they’re talking about holy wars and blessings and some freaky church crap that I don’t think Pastor Amy would really like that much.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, so long that Sam began to think that he’d been confessing his thoughts to a junkyard mechanic from South Dakota, but then Bobby began to speak slowly. “You’re just figuring this stuff out on your own, son? Looking at things on the Internet and borrowing John’s books? Your dad and your brother didn’t teach you anything? You really should be asking them. John was one of the best there was.”
“No. Last time I talked to Dean, he tried to tell me that maybe Dad did this kind of thing way back, before we moved out here and I started school. But I don’t really remember anything before Fitchburg, but I figure Dad’s not talking about it even if he did do it and Dean’s -" Sam paused for a moment and caught his breathe. He realised in the back of his head that was babbling nervously, but he couldn't help it. "He’s teaching me how to use a gun and we’re both reading the books, but he kind of freaked out when I said we should talk to some other people because that’s kind of what got him into this mess, but I think that if we just pay attention to who we talk to and don’t go blathering to random people, we should be fine. Right?”
“Fitchburg?” Bobby asked. “You’re up in Wisconsin? I went looking for your dad there when you all went off the radar. Damn, I didn’t think he was that good.”
“Massachusetts. We’re in Massachusetts.” He paused and then asked in a small voice, “I’m not crazy, am I? I mean, I want to believe Dean and the books say he’s right. But…”
“But the folks in town are giving you a wide berth even though they’ve been your friends all your life and you’re beginning to wonder if all of this is leaving a mark on your face?”
“Yeah.”
“No, son. You’re not crazy and neither is your brother.” There was a crash of metal behind Bobby’s voice. “Look, Sam, is this a safe line?”
“What?”
“Can I call you back about this later? On this line?”
“Uh, yeah. It’s my cell phone. I’ll just keep it on.”
*
“What’s with you?” Dean asked sharply, closing the bedroom door behind him. “Dad thinks you’re doing drugs or something. I had to convince him not to test your urine.”
“What?” Sam looked up from his copy of Thaumatographia Pneumatica.
Dean collapsed on his bed and glared at Sam. “Listen to that. He’s playing one of Mom’s old Sinatra records, not Zeppelin or Metallica. You have him seriously freaked. What the Hell is up with you?”
“What do you mean?” Sam closed the book, marking his page with a sticky note and tried to remember acting oddly or drugged. He’d had the revealing, but frustrating conversation with Mr. Singer during the girls’ softball practice. Kelly had teased him afterward about having a mysterious girlfriend until Dean picked him up, the old fashioned growl of the Impala’s engine letting everyone at the fields know that Sam was leaving. When he’d come home, he’d helped himself to Dean’s ever growing collection of esoteric books, weeding through them until he found the ones he had seen referenced online. When Dad came home from the garage and washed off the engine grease, Sam and Dean threw the left over brisket and potatoes into the microwave. Then they’d eaten dinner. He couldn’t see anything odd about his behavior.
“Are you fucking with me?” Dean propped himself up on his arm to better glare at his brother.
Sam frowned. “What?”
“Jesus. You just took off the other night - and I know you were freaked, man, but running off like that is not cool; I thought Dad was going to kill me. I mean, he came home and you’re not here and no one knows where the hell you are. And then you don’t talk to us for days, acting like we’ve got leprosy or something, looking like you haven’t slept in a year. And then you come home tonight and act like, I don’t know, you’re all happy and helpful and shit.”
“So,” Sam said slowly, “you guys think I’m on drugs because I’m happy and helped with dinner.”
“Dude, I think you’re just nuts.” Dean shrugged. “Dad thinks you’re taking uppers because you went from Emo McTeenageangst for a month and a half to suddenly being Happy McFamilyman over night. I told Dad you probably finally got laid.”
“You didn’t.”
“No, I actually didn’t. But, seriously, what’s going on? You get a hot date?”
Sam frowned and tried to forget the look on Kelly’s face when she told him how her dad had forbidden her to go to prom with him. “No.” He paused and thought a moment. “But I’ve been doing some research.”
“And you’re finally okay with living in the crazy house?”
“I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“Sam, I know the look I saw on your face before you took off the other night.” Dean sighed. “It’s okay. Most people would agree with you, anyway.”
“No, I really don’t,” Sam protested. “Look, I called this guy and he says you’re right, about the freaky stuff and about Dad and - ”
“You called someone?”
“What was I supposed to do?” Sam gripped the Thaumatographia Pneumatica tightly. “I read the books. I even looked online. But I need to talk to someone who could give me real answers.”
“And I couldn’t?” Dean’s voice was sharp. “Who was it? Who did you call?”
“I found him online. His name is Bobby Singer. He runs Singer Auto Salvage, like in the picture. He says he knew Dad, knew us.”
“You found Uncle Bobby?”
“Yeah.” Sam nodded. “You know him?”
“Sure. I mean, I haven’t seen him since we moved out here, but when we were kids, we stayed with him all the time. Just… How did you find him? And don’t you know that’s dangerous?”
“I just found him online. It wasn’t that hard to find,” he lied. “And I figured we might have known him.”
Dean just stared at him. “You figured?”
Sam shrugged. “I needed some answers.”
“And did you get them?”
“He said we’re not crazy.” Sam looked back down at his book. “He thought I was dead, when I first told him who I was.”
“What?”
“He said that we - you and me and Dad - just disappeared after something… a stiga?” Sam’s long fingers traced the cover of the Thaumatographia Pneumatica. “He said he thought I died, that that’s why you and Dad just disappeared.”
Dean paled, his skin milky white under freckles, but he didn’t say anything.
“What happened? Is that why I started school late? What happened that made Dad stop all of this?” Sam waved his hand broadly over the books in their room and the holy water and wood and salt hidden between their beds. “Mr. Singer said that Dad was good at this, was the best.”
Dean reached for the cast bronze head that hung around his neck, a nervous habit. “It’s called a shtriga, with an ‘r.’ And Dad, he killed it. It was dead. It died on my bed.”
“It died in your bed?”
“Yeah. I didn’t sleep there anyway.” Dean shrugged and closed his fist around the pendant. “You really want to know?”
“Yeah.” Sam bit his lower lip, thinking for a moment. “I think I do.”
“We were up in Fort Douglas, in Wisconsin. You weren’t even in school and I was playing hooky more than attending. Dad figured I was a better babysitter than anybody else would be, not that we had the money anyway. He was hunting it. It goes after kids, you know? And they were dying. I was too old for it. It’s like Disney World - when you’re ten, you’re an adult. I don’t know. I left you alone.” Dean stared at his knees. “It was just for a couple of minutes, I swear. But… It got in. Dad took it down before I even got back.”
“What happened?”
“You were down for the count. I thought you were dead… that I’d killed you, leaving you in the motel like that. Dad told me to grab our stuff, that we were leaving, He grabbed you and put you in the front seat. We didn’t stop until we were in Illinois, stayed at a hotel there for three days. Dad wouldn’t even let me watch you anymore. Couldn’t trust me. He waited by your bed, waited for you to wake up, and made a lot of phone calls from the room.” Dean frowned, lines etched into his face. “Some people came by - people I didn’t know. They came to look at you and give Dad some books.”
“People?”
Dean shrugged sharply. “Healers? Hunters? I didn’t know. All I know is you weren’t waking up, weren’t doing anything. After three days, we started moving east: Ohio and then New York. You woke up in the car between Canadaigua and Fitchburg. I thought Dad was going to drive off the road. I almost had a freaking heart attack in the back seat. I’d figured that you were like the kids we left back in Wisconsin, that you were dying. And you just fucking yawned and told Dad you were hungry.” Dean swallowed audibly. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so happy in my life.”
“And Dad just stopped? I… got attacked by something and he just stopped?”
“You didn’t just get attacked. You almost died. I don’t know what Dad would have done if you hadn’t woken up.”
Sam stared at Dean. He wasn’t used to Dean being so serious, couldn’t remember the last time he had seen Dean this upset.
“There was one more hunt after that. I don’t know what it was. We got the apartment in Fitchburg and this time he got us both a babysitter. I think he told her he was looking for a job, but he wasn’t. He came home a couple times bleeding. And then it all just ended. He got the job at the garage, got us into a real school.”
Sam got up and sat next to Dean on his bed, brushing shoulders with him. “And here we are?”
“Yeah.” Dean looked up at him with a bleak smile. “Here we are.”
“So, why don’t I remember that?”
“You were out for a week, Sammy,” Dean said, with some affection. “You were six and basically in a coma. Maybe it was a coma. I did research on it a couple years later. You’re lucky you didn’t have brain damage or something. If I hadn’t just left you there…”
“Dude, you were ten.” Sam wrapped an arm loosely around Dean’s shoulder. “How were you supposed to save me from some coma-inducing shtriga-thing?”
“I had a gun,” Dean protested. “I was supposed to watch you, to save you. It was my job.”
“You were ten,” Sam repeated. “Ten. At ten, I was barely able to take care of goldfish. That’s not fair.”
Dean shrugged again.
“Come on. Admit it, you had to remind me to feed him half the time.”
“I guess so.”
Sam smiled. “Now, weren’t you going to show me some book you found on Muslim demons?”
“Yeah.” Dean seemed to take the peace offering for what it was and began to sort through the books on his side of the room.
Part Four
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