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Part Three
Sam scowled at the school building and fingered the cell phone in his pocket. Dean had told him to call him if he wanted a ride home, since he was just picking up odd hours at the garage after Westfield told him to take the rest of the semester off. Paul thought that Dean needed to recover from the camping fiasco and probably wanted to keep the reporters out of the garage, so he wasn’t giving Dean as many hours as he could. Sam knew that Dean was probably at home or maybe at the library in Fitchburg, reading old religious texts or cleaning his knives or looking online to see if any priests sold holy water. Only two days ago, Sam had intercepted a package for Dean that contained plastic bottles of holy water and what looked like a Jesus candle from the Shrine of Divine Mercy. Sam had decided that discretion was the better part of valor and it was safer just not to ask.
He walked down past the local supermarket, the town cemetery, the local First Congregational Church and town hall, and into the shadowed halls of the town library. The library was a small, low red brick building with a neatly manicured lawn and relatively poor selection of books. Usually, if Sam wanted something new to read, he’d take his Buick or borrow Dad’s truck and head into Fitchburg where there were better libraries or, better yet, bookstores with a wide selection. However, he wandered around the stacks for a few minutes, drawn like a magnet to the History and Religion sections, three narrow shelves sharing space by the window overlooking the back parking lot. He ran his fingers down the spines of a couple of books, ones he’d already read, some years ago and some only recently, but he didn’t pull them from the shelves.
He pulled out the worn, old copy of Religion and Legends of Massachusetts. Leaning against the window ledge and sliding his jacket off, he opened the familiar book, flipping to the pages he now knew as well as he knew his friends. The history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and then Commonwealth was, as Sam had long known, full of strangeness and wonder, but the more he learned, the more he was scared of what ever was out there in the woods. He had seen the pictures of Tony’s body on the news, wanted to be sick when he saw it. He’d expected that Tony would have taken a fall or been attacked by some man with a knife, the way it always was on television and in books. But the body was almost unrecognizable, as though it had been crushed under some kind of monumental weight. The wake and funeral had been closed coffin.
He flipped through the book, searching for an answer that was in there somewhere, hidden in the old paper and tiny type. He moved from the religious practices of the native Wompanoag to the conflicts among Protestant sects in the young Commonwealth to clashes between Protestants and Catholics during the Industrial Revolution to the influences of other religions in the twentieth century. He didn’t bother reading about the red-headed hitchhiker of Rehoboth or the Demon of Dover, but scowled at it, angrily, needing the answer that no one, it seemed, could give him. When he could feel the librarian’s suspicious eyes on him, he just pulled his jacket back around his shoulders and walked back out.
The gas station on his right and the bed and breakfast on his left, the tiny shop serving an all-day breakfast on his left and the hardware store on his right. He wasn’t dumb; he could remember the old apartment in Fitchburg. He remembered Dad working a lot and the old lady from upstairs watching him and Dean until Dean was old enough to play babysitter by himself. He remembered, vaguely, the noise of the city at night and Dad always making sure the doors were locked.
But, somehow, it felt to him that Phillipston was and always had been home. He knew he’d been born in Lawrence, Kansas and that they’d moved all around the country when he was still a toddler, but all of that was just a story he’d been told. He grew up here, some in Fitchburg, but mostly right here in Phillipston. He’d ridden his bike with Alex and Josh up to the state park here and had his first kiss with Dara by the bleachers at a dance here. He’d learned to drive on these streets and gotten his first summer job at the grocery store. The idea that there could be things out there, things in the night, didn’t belong with what he knew. They could live elsewhere, but not here, not where he grew up.
Sam wandered to the concrete garage and office of Stone Bridge Autobody, pausing a moment to check if he knew any of the cars in the yard. Dad never expected Sam to take up working on cars the way Dean had, but he was usually pleased to see Sam when he came by the garage. Sam tugged his bag back up onto his shoulder and walked toward the office, where he could often find Dad, Paul, or Robby. Dad’s students usually stayed in the garage itself, working on the cars, not with the customers.
“Would you just listen to me, Winchester?”
Sam froze. Whoever that was, he sounded pretty angry with Dad.
“I’m not part of that anymore. If you don’t need help with your car, leave the garage.”
Some hidden instinct told Sam that he did not want to become involved in this. He stepped behind a car as Dad and another man, a rough looking man with a shaved head, walked out of the office and into the yard. Sam didn’t recognise the other man, but the bruise on his face and heavy clothes made him wonder what he was doing in Phillipston.
“Your own son, John!” the man protested. “You think I don’t remember your kids? All grown up now, I bet, but still the same Sam and Dean Winchester.”
Dad spun on his heel to face the stranger, his back to Sam. “You leave my sons out of this, Caleb.”
“You stubborn son of a bitch,” the man, Caleb, growled.
“I have this handled,” Dad snapped. “I think you can head back to Nebraska.” He headed for the garage, not bothering to look back to see if Caleb was following him.
“At least let me give you something,” Caleb said, moving quickly to catch up with Dad.
Sam paused a moment, waiting to see if either man would walk back out of the garage. When no one returned to the yard, he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. “Hey, Dean? Yeah, I’m at the library… Yeah. I’ll be done in about ten minutes… Yeah, that’d be great.”
*
While Sam was talking to Josh and Alex after school, his cell phone trilled, ringing the sound of a howler monkey through the halls from somewhere inside his backpack. Alex and Josh laughed as Sam went scrambling for his backpack and dug past textbooks and soda cans for the cell phone.
“Hello?” he asked, a little breathlessly, motioning with his free hand for Josh and Alex to either shut up or go away.
“This a bad time?”
Sam immediately recognised Mr. Singer’s gruff voice and picked up his backpack, slinging it over one shoulder. He waved to his friends and silently mouthed, ‘Dad,’ at them. Making his way to the door, he told Mr. Singer, “No, it’s a fine time. Nothing going on. Why?”
“I did some research last night. For all that your dad was good at going to ground, you and your brother are shit at it.”
Sam swung open the green metal doors and stepped onto the sidewalk. “We’re bad at, what, going to ground? Are we supposed to be hiding?”
Mr. Singer made a noise of mild disgust into the phone. “I don’t see any other way about it. But you boys, you make news. You went to the state championship and got your name in the Boston Globe. And with these recent problems with your brother’s roommate, that’s all over certain sites. Hadn’t hit the papers out here though.”
“Uh…” Sam began to think that Dean had a point when he said that it was dangerous, just finding Mr. Singer’s number online and calling him.
“Been doing some fair bit of research, though. Looked into your brother’s situation, after I figured out that it really was the Winchesters involved in this.” Mr. Singer chuckled on the other end of the line. “Never thought I’d hear from you lot again.”
“So what can we do? Do you know what it is?”
“I’ll know more when I get there, son. You can only do so much from South Dakota.”
“When you get here?” Sam froze on the sidewalk. How the Hell was he going to explain Mr. Singer’s presence to Dad? If Dean thought it was a bad idea, Dad would go ballistic.
“Greenfield, anyway, where everything began. I’ve got an idea of what it could be, but I’ll know more when I get there. I was going to be in Pennsylvania this week anyway, not much to make the trip, not to help the Winchesters.”
Sam touched the knife he’d taken to hiding in his belt, taking a cue from Dean’s so-called paranoia. He could do this. “Can I - can I do it with you?”
“What?”
“It - whatever it is - it’s got Dean scared. I want to kill it. I need to,” Sam explained hurriedly, his words blending into one another. “I need to be able to tell Dean that it’s okay again. That whatever’s out there, it’s gone.”
“Oh, son.” Mr. Singer sighed. “It don’t work like that. Even if we get this thing, there’ll still be more out there.”
“I don’t care. I need to be able to tell Dean that it’s gone. Then I can work on taking out the other things.”
“You sure you ain’t lying to me when you say nobody taught you how to hunt?”
Sam frowned, even though he knew Mr. Singer couldn’t see it. “Well, Dean taught me how to use a gun… And gave me a good knife…”
“I take your point.” He paused for a moment, leaving dead air on the line. “I’ll be at the Candlelight Motor Inn in Greenfield on Saturday. You can find me there if you still want to hunt this thing. But you need to be prepared to follow orders and keep your head down. I won’t have you getting hurt in this.”
“Candlelight Motor Inn, Greenfield, Saturday,” Sam repeated. “I’ll see you there. Should I bring my gun?”
“Should you bring your gun? I’m not going to damn well give you mine.”
*
Saturday morning started off with a bang.
“What is this?”
Sam opened his eyes to see Dad holding one of Sam’s knives carefully in his right hand. The blue-gray early morning light wasn’t terribly bright and their room was still full of nighttime shadows, but Sam could see the anger in Dad’s face quite clearly. He was in his grass stained jeans and one of his old USMC shirts, obviously ready to get them up for a rousing morning of yard work. He felt, rather than saw, Dean shoot up from his bed and definitely felt it as Dean’s feet hit the lightly salted floor of their room.
“I can explain,” Dean said, his voice breathless with sleep.
“This is a knife,” Dad told him slowly. “And it is marked with,” he twisted the knife to get a better look at the blade in the dim light, “what look like etchings of some kind.”
Sam sat up as he watched Dean’s eyes widen.
“I thought we were done with this. You said you’d talked to that Dr. Kelly. You told me you didn’t think you need to do this anymore.” Dad’s eyes was sad, but his voice was desperate and angry. “You told me we were done with this.”
When Dean winced at Dad’s tone, Sam didn’t even think before he spoke. “It’s mine.”
“Sam -”
“Don’t,” Dad said sharply. “Sam, let Dean tell me what’s going on. Don’t try to step in. Don’t try to deflect this. I want to know why there’s a marked up knife in your bedroom. I will have a straight answer. You will tell me.”
“I’m telling you -”
“Sam! Let your brother speak!”
Dean eyed the knife in Dad’s hands and the holy letters etched into it. “Sam and I were just cleaning out some old things last night. That’s one of my old knives, from when I was at Bernard’s. I swear.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I swear, Dad.” Dean’s eyes were wide and Sam wanted to be able to do something, to step between them, to stop the argument, to get them to just understand.
“Dad, it’s not his. I promise, it’s mine. I swear! It’s my knife; I put the etchings there. We learned how to do those at school this year.”
“Sam, stay here. Dean, kitchen, now.” Dad sounded furious.
Dean looked absolutely crestfallen and a little frightened as he followed Dad out of the room, his bare feet leaving a trail on the salted floor.
Sam froze where he was in bed for a moment, not taking any comfort from the warmth of his old flannel sheets. He heard the door to the kitchen close with a bang and the murmur of voices, but he couldn’t make out any words. He came to a decision and quickly swung out of bed, shivering slightly when his feet hit the cold floor. He ignored the cold as he pulled a shirt and jeans from his chest of drawers and grabbed his bag from under his bed. Sam hadn’t told Dean that he’d agreed to meet Mr. Singer in Greenfield - if he’d been upset that he had called the man, he’d go absolutely ballistic - and Sam had packed a small duffel bag with the things he thought he might need: his gun, two boxes of salt, a plastic rosary, one of Dean’s bottles of holy water, a copy of the Rituale Romanum he’d printed off the internet, his notebook, and one of his better knives.
He picked up his old hiking boots in one hand and slung his bag and jacket over his other shoulder. Sam eased the bedroom door open as quietly as he could and took stock of the situation. The doors to the kitchen were closed and, from the tones he could hear, Dad was getting close to all out yelling. He felt bad; he wouldn’t wish Dad’s wrath on anyone and certainly not on Dean because his stupid little brother had been careless with his knives, but he couldn’t have asked for a better distraction. No one was going to ask him where he was going or what was in the bag or when was he going to come back or who he was going to be with. Hell, if Dad were as angry as he’d looked, they wouldn’t notice he was gone for a while yet. He slipped down the hall, silent in his socks, and only put on his boots after he’d closed the front door behind him.
*
Sam had been on Route 2 for only half an hour when he’d realised that he wasn’t imagining that he could hear the purr of the Impala’s engine over the rumble of his Riviera. There was, in fact, a black ‘67 Impala two cars behind him. He wasn’t stupid enough to hope or pray that, by chance, another person with his brother’s exact car happened to be following him after he snuck out of the house. He just gritted his teeth and vowed not to pull over until he reached the Candlelight Motor Inn.
By the time he’d reached the 91 turn off, his bladder was beginning to cause him to regret that decision, but he just hoped that there was a place with a bathroom near the motel. Dean was right behind now and Sam could see his face in his rearview mirror if he wanted. Dean wasn’t tailgating him, per se, but it was coming to a close thing. Dean looked a little surprised when Sam took his exit, but followed him, not letting another car get between them when they got off the highway.
Sam gave a silent prayer of thanks when he saw the McDonald’s next to the run-down motor lodge. The Candlelight Motor Inn looked pretty disreputable, with letters missing from the sign and bits of the first floor railing missing. Sam frowned; it didn’t look like the kind of place that he would want to go, or that Dean or Dad would want him visiting strange men he’d never met. Didn’t remember meeting, Sam corrected himself, thinking of the photograph in the hall. He eased his car into the parking lot and stepped out, waiting for Dean to finish parking and then start whaling on him.
But before Dean could do much more than get out of his car, the grizzled man who had been leaning on one of the balcony supports and watching the goings-on in the McDonald’s parking lot went to the Impala and eyed her with loving respect. “She’s still a beauty, thirty five years out,” the man said, the admiration clear in his voice. “She yours now?”
Dean looked startled, his eyes darting from Sam to the stranger. He normally didn’t get anyone commenting on the Impala outside of the mechanics he worked with. No one in Phillipston much cared that the Winchesters drove a classic anymore. “Uh, yeah. She was my dad’s, but he figured I was good enough at keeping her up and he wanted a truck, anyway.”
The man laughed. “I have trouble imagining John giving up his car, but I suppose he always would do anything for his sons.”
Dean froze and stared, taking a step backward and his right hand moving to touch his pendent, an unconscious gesture of fear. “What?”
“Come on, Sam. I told you I knew your father.”
Before Sam could intervene to explain that, no, he was Sam and this, this was Dean who had no idea why he was here, Dean turned to him and, his face flushing with anger, bit out, “What the hell is going on here?”
Sam smiled nervously and stepped between the two men. “I’m Sam,” he told the man, Mr. Singer. “This is Dean. He, uh, kind of followed me here? Dean, this is Mr. Singer. I told you about talking to him on the phone about everything.”
Dean bit his lower lip and stared at Mr. Singer for a moment. “Uncle Bobby?”
“You sure have grown since I last saw you,” Mr. Singer said slowly, at last, watching Dean. “Always figured you’d be bigger than your brother, though.”
Dean shrugged and didn’t smile.
“And you,” Mr. Singer began, turning to Sam, “are a damn fool if you thought anyone with half a brain wouldn’t follow you if they could even half figure out where you’re going. And if they’re anything like they were ten years ago, both your brother and your daddy have got a damn sight more than half a brain to go on.”
“I didn’t - I just - I only wanted -”
“To make everything safe for your brother,” Mr. Singer finished. “I got that when you first said it. Time was when I thought it was only him that said that, wanting to keep his baby brother safe from the world.”
Both Sam and Dean flushed at that, with both a little embarrassment and a little shame.
“Make everything safe?” Dean repeated. “Safe from what?”
“What do you think, boy? Whatever’s out there in the woods. Whatever killed your buddy.”
Dean paled. “Sam, no. You’re not going out there.”
“I am,” Sam told him. “You didn’t teach me how to use a gun and knives and holy water for nothing. I didn’t read those books and review my Latin because I was going to stay home scared.”
“But - Tony’s dead, Sam. And it wasn’t a pretty death. Do you want to force me and Dad to have a funeral like that for you?”
Sam winced. “I don’t - but I can’t have life going on like this. You and Dad are wearing circles around each other. He puts down a blessed holding circle; you lay down the salt. You make sure we have the Rituale Romanum; he makes sure we have the Lesser Key of Solomon. You carve runes into the trees and he hides them in our cars. It’s not doing anything. People hike around here all the fucking time. Eventually someone else is going to end up like Tony.”
“You’re going in totally unprepared! You have no idea what you’re up against or what you’re doing!”
“Actually, we do.” Sam and Dean turned to Mr. Singer who had pulled a couple of sheets of paper from his pocket. “You two might have no idea what you’re doing, but I’ve been hunting since before you were in diapers. And I did my research before hauling my kit all the way out here. Tony Farro’s not this thing’s this first victim and some of them had witnesses. Most of them were at little more talkative than you. I’m figuring that we’re up against a myling.”
“A myling?” Sam asked, looking to Dean, who looked just as baffled.
“An utburd. It’s the ghost of an unbaptised child,” Mr. Singer explained as though the information were obvious. “We need to find it’s bones and rebury them.”
“And salt and burn them?” Dean asked.
“That’s probably a good idea, too. I hope you brought your own shovel, Sam.”
Dean’s eyes darted between Sam and Mr. Singer. “Oh, no, I’m coming, too. I’m not letting you take Sam to god knows where to hunt killer ghosts alone.”
“Are you sure?” Sam asked, frowning slightly. “I mean… You don’t have anything with you and…”
“I’m not an idiot.” Dean reached into his belt and pulled out one of his knives. “And I’ve got some salt and water in the car.” He paused. “Besides, I think it’s time I did this. No more hiding, waiting for the things in the dark to get me. It’s time for the things in the dark to hide and wait for me to get them.”
Sam looked at his brother for a long moment and then nodded. He went back to his Buick and grabbed his duffel bag, checking to make sure the the holy water hadn’t spilled anywhere. After stowing it in the back of the Impala, he smiled. “What do you think about getting some coffee and telling us about how to kill a myling, Mr. Singer?”
“Call me Bobby.”
Part Five
Sam scowled at the school building and fingered the cell phone in his pocket. Dean had told him to call him if he wanted a ride home, since he was just picking up odd hours at the garage after Westfield told him to take the rest of the semester off. Paul thought that Dean needed to recover from the camping fiasco and probably wanted to keep the reporters out of the garage, so he wasn’t giving Dean as many hours as he could. Sam knew that Dean was probably at home or maybe at the library in Fitchburg, reading old religious texts or cleaning his knives or looking online to see if any priests sold holy water. Only two days ago, Sam had intercepted a package for Dean that contained plastic bottles of holy water and what looked like a Jesus candle from the Shrine of Divine Mercy. Sam had decided that discretion was the better part of valor and it was safer just not to ask.
He walked down past the local supermarket, the town cemetery, the local First Congregational Church and town hall, and into the shadowed halls of the town library. The library was a small, low red brick building with a neatly manicured lawn and relatively poor selection of books. Usually, if Sam wanted something new to read, he’d take his Buick or borrow Dad’s truck and head into Fitchburg where there were better libraries or, better yet, bookstores with a wide selection. However, he wandered around the stacks for a few minutes, drawn like a magnet to the History and Religion sections, three narrow shelves sharing space by the window overlooking the back parking lot. He ran his fingers down the spines of a couple of books, ones he’d already read, some years ago and some only recently, but he didn’t pull them from the shelves.
He pulled out the worn, old copy of Religion and Legends of Massachusetts. Leaning against the window ledge and sliding his jacket off, he opened the familiar book, flipping to the pages he now knew as well as he knew his friends. The history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and then Commonwealth was, as Sam had long known, full of strangeness and wonder, but the more he learned, the more he was scared of what ever was out there in the woods. He had seen the pictures of Tony’s body on the news, wanted to be sick when he saw it. He’d expected that Tony would have taken a fall or been attacked by some man with a knife, the way it always was on television and in books. But the body was almost unrecognizable, as though it had been crushed under some kind of monumental weight. The wake and funeral had been closed coffin.
He flipped through the book, searching for an answer that was in there somewhere, hidden in the old paper and tiny type. He moved from the religious practices of the native Wompanoag to the conflicts among Protestant sects in the young Commonwealth to clashes between Protestants and Catholics during the Industrial Revolution to the influences of other religions in the twentieth century. He didn’t bother reading about the red-headed hitchhiker of Rehoboth or the Demon of Dover, but scowled at it, angrily, needing the answer that no one, it seemed, could give him. When he could feel the librarian’s suspicious eyes on him, he just pulled his jacket back around his shoulders and walked back out.
The gas station on his right and the bed and breakfast on his left, the tiny shop serving an all-day breakfast on his left and the hardware store on his right. He wasn’t dumb; he could remember the old apartment in Fitchburg. He remembered Dad working a lot and the old lady from upstairs watching him and Dean until Dean was old enough to play babysitter by himself. He remembered, vaguely, the noise of the city at night and Dad always making sure the doors were locked.
But, somehow, it felt to him that Phillipston was and always had been home. He knew he’d been born in Lawrence, Kansas and that they’d moved all around the country when he was still a toddler, but all of that was just a story he’d been told. He grew up here, some in Fitchburg, but mostly right here in Phillipston. He’d ridden his bike with Alex and Josh up to the state park here and had his first kiss with Dara by the bleachers at a dance here. He’d learned to drive on these streets and gotten his first summer job at the grocery store. The idea that there could be things out there, things in the night, didn’t belong with what he knew. They could live elsewhere, but not here, not where he grew up.
Sam wandered to the concrete garage and office of Stone Bridge Autobody, pausing a moment to check if he knew any of the cars in the yard. Dad never expected Sam to take up working on cars the way Dean had, but he was usually pleased to see Sam when he came by the garage. Sam tugged his bag back up onto his shoulder and walked toward the office, where he could often find Dad, Paul, or Robby. Dad’s students usually stayed in the garage itself, working on the cars, not with the customers.
“Would you just listen to me, Winchester?”
Sam froze. Whoever that was, he sounded pretty angry with Dad.
“I’m not part of that anymore. If you don’t need help with your car, leave the garage.”
Some hidden instinct told Sam that he did not want to become involved in this. He stepped behind a car as Dad and another man, a rough looking man with a shaved head, walked out of the office and into the yard. Sam didn’t recognise the other man, but the bruise on his face and heavy clothes made him wonder what he was doing in Phillipston.
“Your own son, John!” the man protested. “You think I don’t remember your kids? All grown up now, I bet, but still the same Sam and Dean Winchester.”
Dad spun on his heel to face the stranger, his back to Sam. “You leave my sons out of this, Caleb.”
“You stubborn son of a bitch,” the man, Caleb, growled.
“I have this handled,” Dad snapped. “I think you can head back to Nebraska.” He headed for the garage, not bothering to look back to see if Caleb was following him.
“At least let me give you something,” Caleb said, moving quickly to catch up with Dad.
Sam paused a moment, waiting to see if either man would walk back out of the garage. When no one returned to the yard, he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. “Hey, Dean? Yeah, I’m at the library… Yeah. I’ll be done in about ten minutes… Yeah, that’d be great.”
*
While Sam was talking to Josh and Alex after school, his cell phone trilled, ringing the sound of a howler monkey through the halls from somewhere inside his backpack. Alex and Josh laughed as Sam went scrambling for his backpack and dug past textbooks and soda cans for the cell phone.
“Hello?” he asked, a little breathlessly, motioning with his free hand for Josh and Alex to either shut up or go away.
“This a bad time?”
Sam immediately recognised Mr. Singer’s gruff voice and picked up his backpack, slinging it over one shoulder. He waved to his friends and silently mouthed, ‘Dad,’ at them. Making his way to the door, he told Mr. Singer, “No, it’s a fine time. Nothing going on. Why?”
“I did some research last night. For all that your dad was good at going to ground, you and your brother are shit at it.”
Sam swung open the green metal doors and stepped onto the sidewalk. “We’re bad at, what, going to ground? Are we supposed to be hiding?”
Mr. Singer made a noise of mild disgust into the phone. “I don’t see any other way about it. But you boys, you make news. You went to the state championship and got your name in the Boston Globe. And with these recent problems with your brother’s roommate, that’s all over certain sites. Hadn’t hit the papers out here though.”
“Uh…” Sam began to think that Dean had a point when he said that it was dangerous, just finding Mr. Singer’s number online and calling him.
“Been doing some fair bit of research, though. Looked into your brother’s situation, after I figured out that it really was the Winchesters involved in this.” Mr. Singer chuckled on the other end of the line. “Never thought I’d hear from you lot again.”
“So what can we do? Do you know what it is?”
“I’ll know more when I get there, son. You can only do so much from South Dakota.”
“When you get here?” Sam froze on the sidewalk. How the Hell was he going to explain Mr. Singer’s presence to Dad? If Dean thought it was a bad idea, Dad would go ballistic.
“Greenfield, anyway, where everything began. I’ve got an idea of what it could be, but I’ll know more when I get there. I was going to be in Pennsylvania this week anyway, not much to make the trip, not to help the Winchesters.”
Sam touched the knife he’d taken to hiding in his belt, taking a cue from Dean’s so-called paranoia. He could do this. “Can I - can I do it with you?”
“What?”
“It - whatever it is - it’s got Dean scared. I want to kill it. I need to,” Sam explained hurriedly, his words blending into one another. “I need to be able to tell Dean that it’s okay again. That whatever’s out there, it’s gone.”
“Oh, son.” Mr. Singer sighed. “It don’t work like that. Even if we get this thing, there’ll still be more out there.”
“I don’t care. I need to be able to tell Dean that it’s gone. Then I can work on taking out the other things.”
“You sure you ain’t lying to me when you say nobody taught you how to hunt?”
Sam frowned, even though he knew Mr. Singer couldn’t see it. “Well, Dean taught me how to use a gun… And gave me a good knife…”
“I take your point.” He paused for a moment, leaving dead air on the line. “I’ll be at the Candlelight Motor Inn in Greenfield on Saturday. You can find me there if you still want to hunt this thing. But you need to be prepared to follow orders and keep your head down. I won’t have you getting hurt in this.”
“Candlelight Motor Inn, Greenfield, Saturday,” Sam repeated. “I’ll see you there. Should I bring my gun?”
“Should you bring your gun? I’m not going to damn well give you mine.”
*
Saturday morning started off with a bang.
“What is this?”
Sam opened his eyes to see Dad holding one of Sam’s knives carefully in his right hand. The blue-gray early morning light wasn’t terribly bright and their room was still full of nighttime shadows, but Sam could see the anger in Dad’s face quite clearly. He was in his grass stained jeans and one of his old USMC shirts, obviously ready to get them up for a rousing morning of yard work. He felt, rather than saw, Dean shoot up from his bed and definitely felt it as Dean’s feet hit the lightly salted floor of their room.
“I can explain,” Dean said, his voice breathless with sleep.
“This is a knife,” Dad told him slowly. “And it is marked with,” he twisted the knife to get a better look at the blade in the dim light, “what look like etchings of some kind.”
Sam sat up as he watched Dean’s eyes widen.
“I thought we were done with this. You said you’d talked to that Dr. Kelly. You told me you didn’t think you need to do this anymore.” Dad’s eyes was sad, but his voice was desperate and angry. “You told me we were done with this.”
When Dean winced at Dad’s tone, Sam didn’t even think before he spoke. “It’s mine.”
“Sam -”
“Don’t,” Dad said sharply. “Sam, let Dean tell me what’s going on. Don’t try to step in. Don’t try to deflect this. I want to know why there’s a marked up knife in your bedroom. I will have a straight answer. You will tell me.”
“I’m telling you -”
“Sam! Let your brother speak!”
Dean eyed the knife in Dad’s hands and the holy letters etched into it. “Sam and I were just cleaning out some old things last night. That’s one of my old knives, from when I was at Bernard’s. I swear.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I swear, Dad.” Dean’s eyes were wide and Sam wanted to be able to do something, to step between them, to stop the argument, to get them to just understand.
“Dad, it’s not his. I promise, it’s mine. I swear! It’s my knife; I put the etchings there. We learned how to do those at school this year.”
“Sam, stay here. Dean, kitchen, now.” Dad sounded furious.
Dean looked absolutely crestfallen and a little frightened as he followed Dad out of the room, his bare feet leaving a trail on the salted floor.
Sam froze where he was in bed for a moment, not taking any comfort from the warmth of his old flannel sheets. He heard the door to the kitchen close with a bang and the murmur of voices, but he couldn’t make out any words. He came to a decision and quickly swung out of bed, shivering slightly when his feet hit the cold floor. He ignored the cold as he pulled a shirt and jeans from his chest of drawers and grabbed his bag from under his bed. Sam hadn’t told Dean that he’d agreed to meet Mr. Singer in Greenfield - if he’d been upset that he had called the man, he’d go absolutely ballistic - and Sam had packed a small duffel bag with the things he thought he might need: his gun, two boxes of salt, a plastic rosary, one of Dean’s bottles of holy water, a copy of the Rituale Romanum he’d printed off the internet, his notebook, and one of his better knives.
He picked up his old hiking boots in one hand and slung his bag and jacket over his other shoulder. Sam eased the bedroom door open as quietly as he could and took stock of the situation. The doors to the kitchen were closed and, from the tones he could hear, Dad was getting close to all out yelling. He felt bad; he wouldn’t wish Dad’s wrath on anyone and certainly not on Dean because his stupid little brother had been careless with his knives, but he couldn’t have asked for a better distraction. No one was going to ask him where he was going or what was in the bag or when was he going to come back or who he was going to be with. Hell, if Dad were as angry as he’d looked, they wouldn’t notice he was gone for a while yet. He slipped down the hall, silent in his socks, and only put on his boots after he’d closed the front door behind him.
*
Sam had been on Route 2 for only half an hour when he’d realised that he wasn’t imagining that he could hear the purr of the Impala’s engine over the rumble of his Riviera. There was, in fact, a black ‘67 Impala two cars behind him. He wasn’t stupid enough to hope or pray that, by chance, another person with his brother’s exact car happened to be following him after he snuck out of the house. He just gritted his teeth and vowed not to pull over until he reached the Candlelight Motor Inn.
By the time he’d reached the 91 turn off, his bladder was beginning to cause him to regret that decision, but he just hoped that there was a place with a bathroom near the motel. Dean was right behind now and Sam could see his face in his rearview mirror if he wanted. Dean wasn’t tailgating him, per se, but it was coming to a close thing. Dean looked a little surprised when Sam took his exit, but followed him, not letting another car get between them when they got off the highway.
Sam gave a silent prayer of thanks when he saw the McDonald’s next to the run-down motor lodge. The Candlelight Motor Inn looked pretty disreputable, with letters missing from the sign and bits of the first floor railing missing. Sam frowned; it didn’t look like the kind of place that he would want to go, or that Dean or Dad would want him visiting strange men he’d never met. Didn’t remember meeting, Sam corrected himself, thinking of the photograph in the hall. He eased his car into the parking lot and stepped out, waiting for Dean to finish parking and then start whaling on him.
But before Dean could do much more than get out of his car, the grizzled man who had been leaning on one of the balcony supports and watching the goings-on in the McDonald’s parking lot went to the Impala and eyed her with loving respect. “She’s still a beauty, thirty five years out,” the man said, the admiration clear in his voice. “She yours now?”
Dean looked startled, his eyes darting from Sam to the stranger. He normally didn’t get anyone commenting on the Impala outside of the mechanics he worked with. No one in Phillipston much cared that the Winchesters drove a classic anymore. “Uh, yeah. She was my dad’s, but he figured I was good enough at keeping her up and he wanted a truck, anyway.”
The man laughed. “I have trouble imagining John giving up his car, but I suppose he always would do anything for his sons.”
Dean froze and stared, taking a step backward and his right hand moving to touch his pendent, an unconscious gesture of fear. “What?”
“Come on, Sam. I told you I knew your father.”
Before Sam could intervene to explain that, no, he was Sam and this, this was Dean who had no idea why he was here, Dean turned to him and, his face flushing with anger, bit out, “What the hell is going on here?”
Sam smiled nervously and stepped between the two men. “I’m Sam,” he told the man, Mr. Singer. “This is Dean. He, uh, kind of followed me here? Dean, this is Mr. Singer. I told you about talking to him on the phone about everything.”
Dean bit his lower lip and stared at Mr. Singer for a moment. “Uncle Bobby?”
“You sure have grown since I last saw you,” Mr. Singer said slowly, at last, watching Dean. “Always figured you’d be bigger than your brother, though.”
Dean shrugged and didn’t smile.
“And you,” Mr. Singer began, turning to Sam, “are a damn fool if you thought anyone with half a brain wouldn’t follow you if they could even half figure out where you’re going. And if they’re anything like they were ten years ago, both your brother and your daddy have got a damn sight more than half a brain to go on.”
“I didn’t - I just - I only wanted -”
“To make everything safe for your brother,” Mr. Singer finished. “I got that when you first said it. Time was when I thought it was only him that said that, wanting to keep his baby brother safe from the world.”
Both Sam and Dean flushed at that, with both a little embarrassment and a little shame.
“Make everything safe?” Dean repeated. “Safe from what?”
“What do you think, boy? Whatever’s out there in the woods. Whatever killed your buddy.”
Dean paled. “Sam, no. You’re not going out there.”
“I am,” Sam told him. “You didn’t teach me how to use a gun and knives and holy water for nothing. I didn’t read those books and review my Latin because I was going to stay home scared.”
“But - Tony’s dead, Sam. And it wasn’t a pretty death. Do you want to force me and Dad to have a funeral like that for you?”
Sam winced. “I don’t - but I can’t have life going on like this. You and Dad are wearing circles around each other. He puts down a blessed holding circle; you lay down the salt. You make sure we have the Rituale Romanum; he makes sure we have the Lesser Key of Solomon. You carve runes into the trees and he hides them in our cars. It’s not doing anything. People hike around here all the fucking time. Eventually someone else is going to end up like Tony.”
“You’re going in totally unprepared! You have no idea what you’re up against or what you’re doing!”
“Actually, we do.” Sam and Dean turned to Mr. Singer who had pulled a couple of sheets of paper from his pocket. “You two might have no idea what you’re doing, but I’ve been hunting since before you were in diapers. And I did my research before hauling my kit all the way out here. Tony Farro’s not this thing’s this first victim and some of them had witnesses. Most of them were at little more talkative than you. I’m figuring that we’re up against a myling.”
“A myling?” Sam asked, looking to Dean, who looked just as baffled.
“An utburd. It’s the ghost of an unbaptised child,” Mr. Singer explained as though the information were obvious. “We need to find it’s bones and rebury them.”
“And salt and burn them?” Dean asked.
“That’s probably a good idea, too. I hope you brought your own shovel, Sam.”
Dean’s eyes darted between Sam and Mr. Singer. “Oh, no, I’m coming, too. I’m not letting you take Sam to god knows where to hunt killer ghosts alone.”
“Are you sure?” Sam asked, frowning slightly. “I mean… You don’t have anything with you and…”
“I’m not an idiot.” Dean reached into his belt and pulled out one of his knives. “And I’ve got some salt and water in the car.” He paused. “Besides, I think it’s time I did this. No more hiding, waiting for the things in the dark to get me. It’s time for the things in the dark to hide and wait for me to get them.”
Sam looked at his brother for a long moment and then nodded. He went back to his Buick and grabbed his duffel bag, checking to make sure the the holy water hadn’t spilled anywhere. After stowing it in the back of the Impala, he smiled. “What do you think about getting some coffee and telling us about how to kill a myling, Mr. Singer?”
“Call me Bobby.”
Part Five
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