The mute and his silent tale
Two dark silhouettes filled the red dust, cut against the warm glare of the setting star, their shadows stretching out on the empty street like giants waking up.
The sounds of sharp spurs clapped against the ground as they walk forward, sure steps, loose strides and confident postures.
They were both tall, almost as tall as their black shadows drawn on the floor, and they walked close to each other. Companions. Brothers in arms. Brothers in blood.
Written as a challenge for the SPN Writers Lounge. The idea was to use the images above as a prompt for a story. So, this was born.
Huge thank you note to Jackfan2, for her ideas, for her writing, her betaing and for the lightning-speed fastness in which she provided all of those!
Happy reading!
The mute and his silent tale
The street was deserted at that time of the day, the sun setting bright and red in the horizon. A moon, just as a red and full would be coming up next, in a couple of hours.
Red seemed to suite the dirt streets, dust looking like blood flecks, scattered in the wind.
Two dark silhouettes filled the red dust, cut against the warm glare of the setting star, their shadows stretching out on the empty street like giants waking up.
The sounds of sharp spurs clapped against the ground as they walked forward, sure steps, loose strides and confident postures.
They were both tall, almost as tall as their black shadows drawn on the floor, and they walked close to each other. Companions. Brothers in arms. Brothers in blood.
Their guns, slinging loosely from their hips, were strapped tight to their long legs. Relaxed fingers moved idly inches away. Peaceful in their stance; coiled to action in a second’s notice.
Their tall brimmed hats cast darker shadows over their faces, but there was no need to see their eyes to know that they were both dangerous. Men like that always were. That was how epic stories were born.
“This is stupid,” Dean complained, pulling at the brown bandanna hanging from his neck for the tenth time in the last hour. “One more time… why are we dressed like circus clowns?”
“You know why… ghost won't come out unless we’re dressed to the occasion and all the other victims were role-playing, so we need to do the same,” Sam supplied, for what seemed like, and probably was, the tenth time since they’d arrived. “And we’re not dressed as clowns; we’re dressed as nineteen century cowboys.”
“Same difference,” huffed Dean, adjusting the too tight jeans under the brown fake-leather chaps. Damn things seemed to have a mind of their own on how high to get up his damn crotch. “Besides, you’re the one playing bait… don’t see why I have to be dragged in to wearing this stupid looking piece of sh-“
“Because the ghost won’t show up if we BOTH don’t look the part,” Sam reminded him -again- “And you’re the one who wouldn’t let me handle this alone, so suck it up! Besides, you DO look the part,” Sam said with a barely hidden snigger.
Sam had to admit that, all teasing apart, his brother did look at home in the fake frontier-land abandoned town, wearing those clothes. The cocky swagger, the bowlegged walk… Dean had never ridden a horse in his whole life, but right now, dressed like that; he looked like he’d lived on top of one since walking in diapers.
Sam just hopped that they both looked like cowboys enough to draw the ghost to them... before she killed someone else.
In the past two months, fifteen young men, ages from twenty-five to thirty, had dropped dead two days after visiting the Deadwood Real Life Experience, the one place on Earth where you could be a real cowboy or cowgirl for a day.
No one seemed to find any relation between the dead young men and the park -other than the fact that all of the victims had been there- but still, it had closed a week ago. No one was willing to take any chances.
Everyone who knew the victims had the same tale to tell. They went to Deadwood to have a good time, they'd lost sight of the victim for a little while and next thing they knew, the young guy was found kissing a blond woman in a white dress. No one knew who she was, no one seemed to identify her as an employee, and no one ever saw her after her make-out sessions with each of the victims. And two days later, the guys were always doornails.
The fact that all of the men that she had chose to 'attack' seemed to be freakishly tall with floppy brown hair, had made the choice on which of the Winchesters would play bait to lure this particularly evasive blond ghost, pretty easy.
A background check on the amusement park had revealed that not all was a fake in Deadwood, Arizona. A couple of the houses were real enough and the ghost they were hunting, could be no other than Elisabeth Dumm, Deadwood’s sad, Shakespearian story.
Elisabeth had come to the west with her father in 1859. Killed herself in 1862. She was barely eighteen at the time.
Story goes that she’d fallen in love with the town’s freak, a mute boy working at her father’s stables. Fearful of spreading the muteness to his grandchildren, the father had forbidden any sort of relationship between the two of them.
The stable boy was sent to war in 1861. News of his death arrived six months later. Distraught, Elisabeth had wandered naked into the desert on the day after that. Two days later, her body was found, snake bite on her ankle.
But that was not to be the ending of Elisabeth’s story.
A flood, five years after her death, had unearthed half the coffins buried in the town’s cemetery. Elisabeth’s was amongst those, the wooden lid of the casket found open and all scratched on the inside. They’d buried her alive.
They burned her remains after that, fearful of her wronged spirit, or so they said in the newspaper clipping of those days. Truth was, there were so many decomposing bodies that no one seemed able to match them with just as many disturbed graves. So, according to a couple of journals salvaged from those times, the town had just made one big, communal mass grave and burned them all in to eternal rest.
The story, in all its macabre horror, had lived on and was now a part of the attraction. The Dumm’s house was clean of EMF but still, there was no doubt in the Winchester's minds that it was Elisabeth doing the killings.
It had been the coroner’s reports that had initially caught their attention. All victims had died of rattlesnake poisoning, the Mojave particularly nasty kind. The kick was, none of the victims had been bitten.
A bit of net-fu on Sam’s part, and they’d been able to put together that the reason why the victims were dying from a poisonous snake that had never bitten them was the same reason why poor Elisabeth had been buried alive.
That particular kind of rattlesnake, unlike its more tame counterparts, injected a powerful paralyzing neurotoxin in its victims.
Those who'd seen Elisabeth’s ghost had died of respiratory arrest when the paralyzes reached their chest muscles. Elisabeth hadn’t been so lucky and, in a time when the town’s doctor was often the guy who cut your hair, she found herself waking up in a closed box, six feet under.
With no remains left to burn, and no sign of the ghost anywhere in town when the Winchesters had scouted the place, they’d resorted to doing what all the other victims had done: grabbed themselves an old pair of jeans, strapped on some fake leather chaps, rolled up the sleeves of their button-down shirts and attached some shiny spurs to their everyday boots. The hats and bandannas had been Sam’s idea, because if they were playing the part, they might as well look the part all the way through.
The guns strapped to their hips were the only thing real in their strange outfits. No real bullets, thought. Those wouldn’t do much to keep Elisabeth’s ghost at bay.
“Think of yourself as John Wayne, coming to town to rescue the poor people who are under the rule of an evil, moustached band of villains,” Sam said, still teasing his brother, because it was funny to see Dean trying to walk without stumbling on the damn chaps, unaccustomed to their added weight and length or the way they kept ridding up his legs. "Though I don't think Wayne had the bow legs as down to pat as you..."
Dean threw his sand coloured hat in his brother’s direction, but the missile was too light to actually hit the target. He resorted to punching Sam’s shoulder. Hard.
Spying the double door to the fake town’s saloon, Dean smirked and speed up, throwing back a knowing glance to his brother, "Think they left anything in here?”
Dean didn't even wait for his brother's answer, leaning down to pick the lock of the salon's door. It gave away in less that two seconds, the doors opening easily under his push. Dean took one look inside and his grin widened to epic proportions. "Yo! Sammy! DRINKS! DUDE! The place is fully stocked! They didn't even bother emptying it!"
Sam turned from where he’d been testing the bolted door of what seemed to be the town's barbershop, to see Dean standing at the entrance of the Deadwood Saloon. "Hum.. Dean, I don't think that's such a go-". But before he could get a word in, Dean had already ducked inside, "-ood idea," Sam finished, all but talking to himself.
Sam rolled his eyes and followed Dean to the, now open, salon, grabbing the swinging short doors in the wake of his brother’s entrance.
There hadn't been a specific place where Elisabeth usually showed up, which meant that they’d been walking up and down the one street in town for close to two hours now. He wasn’t sure about hard drinks, but Sam was hopping that there would be at least a couple of cool water bottles in there.
The place was dark, except for a few strings of dying light coming from the large glass windows to one side. Wherever the beams of light hit, they revealed without shame the dust cloud inside, suspended in midair, like the place had been standing still for more than a hundred years.
It certainly didn’t look like there had been hundreds of people roaming those streets just a couple of weeks ago, playing fake duels and taking pictures with the salon girls. The desert was already claming this town, just like it did back then when people went away.
The decoration of the salon in itself was pretty generic. Cheap glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling, wooden tables scattered through the main room, one small stage on the side and a long bar counter taking the entire opposite wall. The mirror behind it reflected the room in reverse, mixed bottles in golden, green and black hues lined up against the shelves, marking the frontier between reality and illusion.
“Dean?” Sam called out, not seeing his brother at first glance. Dean had gone in seconds before him, it seemed odd that he’d managed to disappear that fast. “Dean! Quit screwing around, we’re on a job!”
The silence that answered was pregnant with grim possibilities. It froze the blood in Sam’s veins. “Dean?”
Two quick strides, made more ominous by the staccato of Sam’s spurs against the wooden floorboard, took him to the counter. Sam leaned over, peaking behind it, praying that by some unconceivable, childish reason, Dean was hiding there.
Maybe he had decided to pull a prank on Sam and was finding this all very funny...
But Dean didn’t screw around when he was on a job, no matter how much Sam wanted to believe that right in that moment. Because the other option to Dean screwing around was Dean in trouble and Sam did not want to contemplate that just yet.
There was something on the floor, near the wooden barstools, something that looked too new to belong in that place. Something that Sam had been laughing at not even half an hour before.
Dean's brown bandanna. The one that he'd been struggling with ever since he put the damn thing around his neck.
Scooping up the piece of cotton fabric, Sam glanced around, certain that Dean had to be in there somewhere. No one had gone out through the still swinging front doors, but that didn't mean that there's wasn't a back one somewhere in there through which Dean could’ve been taken. Because one thing was becoming very clear in Sam’s mind: Dean had not disappeared willingly.
With his heart hammering against his tight chest, Sam remembered all of the victims’ families’ recollections. The mysterious disappearance. The odd kiss. The death of their love ones.
Before Sam could decide on whether to start looking for his brother outside or give the empty saloon another go, a muffle noise drew his attention up.
Head back, Sam did a strong double take; the second floor. Taking the steps two at a time, he raced up the stairs, praying those at least where real and that he wouldn't break a leg before reaching the top.
The stairs are real and so were the rooms lining up the whole length of the balusters, above the stage. The first three were as empty as they come; barred up windows that made sure that it was always night inside. The forth was locked, but the poor hinges were no match for Sam’s kick. Still, there was nothing in there but dust and darkness.
Sam’s rapid breaths turned in to a gelid fog when he reached the fifth door and his heart plunged in to the floor. He’d found Elisabeth’s ghost, but he hoped that he hadn’t found Dean as well.
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Dean did not like to role-play. He spent too much time in his life ‘role playing’ as it was, he did not need Sam dragging his ass in to these things, convincing him to put on ridiculous costumes to hunt a ghost.
They put on costumes -proper costumes- of police officers and FBI agents, sometimes even some more ludicrous get-ups of priests and cable-repair guys, to trick people in to talking to them. It was a necessity; it was unavoidable, because the real policemen and the real FBI would never ask the questions that they needed to ask. And besides, the families of victims and the victims themselves would never talk to them if they introduced themselves as Sam and Dean, nobodies from Kansas, supernatural investigators.
They did not dress up as werewolves to hunt the damn things!
This whole cowboy outfit thing… this was ridiculous. And what was worse, this was a ridiculous that wasn’t working. At all.
They’d been walking their asses off on that dusty street for the better part of the afternoon now, and the ghost was still a no-show. Dean’s throat had turned in to sand paper about two hours ago and the constant clinkclinkclink of the spurs was giving him a headache. Dean yanked the stupid bandanna from his neck and threw it on the counter.
Sam, as bait, sucked.
Still, Dean grinned, eyeing the wall behind the bar, this job wasn't without its perks. Bottle after bottle of Jose Cuervo lined the shelves against the mirror behind the counter, just what a thirsty cowboy needed.
“There you are.”
The voice started Dean out of his reverie. The very not-Sam, female voice.
“I’ve been looking for you all over the place.”
Dean turned towards the stairs, watching as a beautiful blond woman dressed in a turn of the century white dress, came down the steps. Elisabeth Dumm.
Dean tried to smile through his confusion. She was supposed to go after Sam, not him. Dean was there solely to put her out of her misery while Sam distracted her with his floppy brown hair and his freakish height. And where was Sam? He’d been right behind Dean, he’d seen Dean walk in to the salon…
“Don’t worry, I don’t care about what they say,” Elisabeth’s shimmering form went on. Dean blinked for half a second and the next thing he knew, she was standing right next to him.
Her breath was gelid, but her brown eyes were warm. Sad. “You don’t need to try to be someone else with me,” she said, raising one cold hand to caress Dean’s face. “I love you just the way you are.”
And before Dean could even think about ducking away from her touch or pulling his rock-salt filled gun out and shoot, her fingers touched his skin and the whole world went away.
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It looked like a scene from an old movie, a black and white movie. If Sam didn’t know better, he would figure that he was dreaming. A really vivid, really bad nightmare.
At first glance, it seemed like any other of the mental-scaring times that Sam had caught his brother with one of his one-night conquests in their motels various rooms.
The main difference was that Dean’s conquests were always breathing, full of life women, not inconsistent and flickering figures like the blond that was currently playing tonsil wrestling with Dean. And the second reason was that Dean wouldn’t usually be crying.
Reacting without really putting much thought behind it besides a ‘get away from my brother, bitch’, Sam shot his sawed off riffle at the ghost. With great satisfaction he watched as her essence scattered away, leaving nothing behind but the white dress that she’d been wearing and a dazzled Dean.
“Dean! You ok man?”
Dean blinked, seeming just as surprised to find his eyelashes wet and sticking to his face, as he was to be looking at Sam. Or maybe it was the fact that Sam was dressed as a cowboy, standing at the entrance of a salon’s raunchy back room, holding a gun like any other gun-slinging pro in those days.
“Burn the dress,” Dean managed after a while.
Sam didn’t ask how Dean knew, he didn’t even question why. Just pulled a handful of salt from his pocket and lit the white dress on fire.
Elisabeth Dumm was finally at rest.
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“You sure you’re alright?” Sam asked for what felt like a millionth time.
Dean just gave him a look that clearly said what would be shoved where if Sam asked that question one more time and silently resumed his cleaning of their weapons.
They had left Deadwood and Arizona in the Impala’s rearview mirror more than twelve hours ago, and other than that short direction on how to finish Elisabeth’s murdering spree, Sam had yet to hear his brother’s voice again in a complete sentence. Some grunts, some nods, one-syllable words and not much else in a way of actual conversation. It was tiring. And it was lonely.
“How did you know that it was the dress keeping her here?” Sam asked after a while, when the silence became once again too heavy to bear.
The question had been plaguing him ever since they’d left. According to the recordings of the story, Elisabeth had wandered naked in to the desert. Why would that particular white dress be important enough to trap her soul on earth?
Dean looked up from his task, opened his mouth, closed it again and cleared his throat.
“It was the last thing she wore before dying,” he finally answered in a raspy voice. “It was John’s favourite.”
“John?”
“The mute boy.”
“And you know this… how?” Sam asked. No where on their research had they even come across the stable boy’s name. He was a side note in Elisabeth’s story, a plot bump in their own tragedy. His name hadn’t been important enough to be recorded.
“She told me,” Dean said, resuming his methodical cleaning.
The smell of gun oil soaked through the air inside the room, the familiarity of it comforting for both brothers.
Sam let his brother take refuge in that, even now when his suspicions that there was more to this story than Dean had let on, had been confirmed.
Dean enjoyed his moments of silence just as much as he enjoyed bugging the hell out of Sam by not shutting up when Sam was bothered with something.
And something was bothering Sam now. Something about the hunt, other than the effect that Elisabeth’s touch had had on his brooding brother. Sam opened his laptop, stealthily turning the screen away from Dean, and pulled up the files they had on the men that Elisabeth had killed.
Why had she gone after Dean instead of him? Granted, Dean was not a short guy, but of all the victims, none ranged under the six foot three mark. Not to mention that if there was one thing that Dean’s military-short hair wasn’t, was floppy. Or brown, for that matter.
Ghosts had patterns for picking up their victims and they were usually sticklers for those patterns. They did not jump around because it made things easier for them or because they ‘felt like it’.
If Elisabeth had picked Dean out of the two of them, it wasn’t because Dean didn’t fit the pattern; it was because the pattern they’d picked up was wrong.
Sam sunk himself in to his research, going deeper than they’d foolishly gone before starting this hunt. He searched school records, medical records, library records. It was only when he was ready to throw in the towel and declare this hunt as one of those he would never fully understand, that he hit the mother load. Credit account records.
It wasn’t much to grab on, but at one point of their lives, all fifteen men had regular payments credit to private offices. Psychological therapist’s offices.
Sam cast a covert glance in to Dean’s side of the room, wondering if the loud yoo-hoo! that he had just let out inside his head had called his brother’s attention to what he was doing, but Dean was too engrossed in methodically pulling apart, cleaning and putting back together each and everyone of the weapons in their trunk, to notice anything.
Now that he had a direction to follow, it was easy for Sam to figure out why those men had sought help. And while psychological files were usually kept on personal computer drives of the person’s therapist, police files were not.
Working on a hunch, Sam figured that if there was a common trauma in the lives of the other victims, odds were it had been a violent one. And violent usually translated as a police record.
When the pattern, the right pattern, the one that would’ve told them that there was no way Elisabeth would’ve gone after Sam instead of Dean, emerged, Sam had to seat back and close his eyes.
How could he not have seen it before?
Elisabeth had fallen in love with a mute man, and in her death she was looking for her lost love. She didn’t care if they were tall or short, if they were brunettes or blonds… it was the silence that she was searching for.
Every one of those fifteen victims had suffered some trauma of various sorts in their childhoods and all of them, for a short time, for a long time, or for the rest of their lives, had become silent in face of that trauma. Mutes, all of them.
Just like four year old Dean, after their mother’s death.
His brother had been so deeply affect by the event that he’d stopped talking for months after... and Sam would’ve have never even known about such an important part of Dean’s troubled childhood if it weren’t for a sweet little boy in Wisconsin. Lucas, as mute as his brother had been at four, was the only reason Sam even knew about this. Because Dean could confess his fears to a scared young boy, but never to those who loved him.
Sam had to fight a sudden urge to get up, knock those guns from his brother’s callous hands and just hug him, hold him tight and tell him he understood, that he saw it now.
The tears that he had seen in Dean’s eyes when Elisabeth had kissed him had nothing to do with the yuck-factor of being kissed by a ghost, they couldn’t even be blamed on how much colder it had been in that place, possibly causing anyone’s eyes to tear up. They weren’t those kind of tears.
The tears had been for the memories that the ghost had been feeding upon, the traumas that the ghost needed to re-inflate so that she could have her mute lover again.
Dean had been crying for their mother, for his loss, for the day he’d stopped being a child and had started to be Dean Winchester.
Sam was about to share his discovery with Dean when he noticed that his brother was looking back at him. But instead of the annoyed look that he’d been throwing his way for the last couple of hours, or even the bored looked that usually signalled that Dean was becoming too fed up of being stuck inside the same motel room for too long, Sam was met with a look of panic.
“What?” Sam found himself asking.
Dean opened his mouth, but nothing came out. And now that Sam was paying attention to it, nothing was going in either. “Dean?”
The plea for help was clear in his brother’s green eyes. He couldn’t breath.
Sam rushed to Dean’s side, catching him just as the older man started to topple towards the bed.
It was painfully clear what was happening and Sam felt his mouth go dry with barely contained panic.
How could they have been so naïve? How could they've believed that, just because Elisabeth was gone, the effects of her poisonous kiss would become harmless?
“We need to get you to a hospital, Dean,” Sam hissed, not really looking for his out-of-breath brother’s consent. Already he was grabbing the car keys from the table and picking up Dean like he would a small child. The fact that his bigger than life brother didn’t even made a sound of protest only scared Sam more.
Sam just hoped that they were not too late.
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“Why didn’t you say something?” Sam asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Dean gave him no answer. It was hard to, with a tube down his throat. Unconsciousness didn’t help either.
So Sam kept on his side of the conversation. It was either that or grow silently and slowly insane, listening to all the low hisses and bips of the electronic devices around his big brother.
“Doctors say that it was a close call as it was,” he went on, grabbing Dean’s cold hand. The ICU room was pleasantly warm, but Dean always seemed to be cold no matter how many blankets were piled on his still form. “They said that it was vital that I was able to give them the exact type of venom you’d been ‘bitten’ with. That a couple more minutes and there would be nothing that they could do,” Sam said, using his free hand to wipe his wet cheeks clean.
Dean remained silent, his chest rising up and falling down mechanically, at the rhythm set by the machine at his side.
“They also said that this type of snake venom starts acting as soon as it hits the blood stream,” Sam went on, the grip on his brother’s hand becoming almost bruising until Sam reminded himself that Dean couldn’t defend himself right now. “Why didn’t you say anything? How could you not tell?”
But only the hisses and bips answered him.
The other men whom Elisabeth had touched hadn’t said anything either, her touch more poisonous than her lips. And they had all died before they could tell anyone what was going on inside their heads.
There was no one to tell Sam how strongly Elisabeth had stirred old, long buried but never healed emotions. There was no one to tell if Dean had actually felt the venom slowly numbing him to death, but hadn’t really realized it. There was no one to tell him even if Dean had welcomed that numbness and allowed it to take away the pain.
Dean was silent. And mute boys told no tales. Sam would just have to wait to hear the ending of this one.
The end
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And to finish it off in all its sweetness :D
COWBOY JENSEN! Courtesy of photographer Michael Muller and brought to you in HQ by Furry1
