SPN fic - The Wind Remembers Their Names - Part 2/3
The noontime sun was bright enough to resurrect Dean’s headache, but did nothing to warm the day. The flashing sign outside the downtown bank read four degrees.
He stepped out from the warmth and dust of the county clerk’s office still zipping his jacket, shuddered at the blast of wind. The library was only a couple blocks away, but he drove it; the Impala’s engine barely had time to warm up.
He found Sam in a quiet corner of the library near the periodicals, the lone occupant of a long, scarred walnut table, surrounded by a spread of books and papers with the laptop and a legal pad front and center. Sam looked up as Dean pulled out a chair. “Done already?”
“Already?” Dean made a face. “I’ve been scrolling through microfilm for four hours. Feels like my eyes are gonna bleed.”
Sam leaned back, looked at his watch. “Huh. Guess I lost track of time. What’d you find?”
“Traced the land back to the 1870s. Most of the area we’re looking at was part of a 160-acre homestead claimed by the Bittner family. Over the years it got split up into smaller parcels, most recently the five-acre lots that make up the Heitzmans’ subdivision.”
“You said most of the area. What about the rest?”
“Parts belonged to adjoining homesteads. One section belonged to the local Mennonite church. Another was the location of the old one-room schoolhouse.”
Sam rolled his pencil between his fingers. “Did the church also have a cemetery?”
“It did, but before you ask, it’s never been disturbed. In fact, it’s been restored, fenced off, and protected as a historic site.” Dean rubbed his eyes. “You get anything?”
“I dunno, maybe. I worked with the troll idea for a while, since a lot of the settlers around here were Scandinavian, but there’s just no evidence to support that theory. I think our best bet is the yuki-onna.”
“The friggin’ Pokemon demon?”
Sam grinned. “The very same. Listen to this.” He pulled up a window on the laptop, read aloud from the web page. “ ‘Her skin is inhumanly pale or even transparent, causing her to blend into the snowy landscape…’ She ‘reveals herself to travelers who find themselves trapped in snowstorms and uses her icy breath to leave them as frost-coated corpses. Other legends say that she leads them astray so they simply die of exposure.’ ”
“I dunno, Sam. A Japanese demon in South Dakota?”
“Anything’s possible.” Sam shrugged. “Maybe it hitched a ride, like those freaky rain-forest spiders hiding in a bunch of bananas.”
“Find anything that says how to kill it?”
Sam shook his head. “Not yet. In fact, the only reference I’ve found to killing it is one that says it can’t be killed.”
“Anything can be killed if you try hard enough.” Dean stood up.
“Where’re you going?”
“Figured I’d drive around to some of the blizzard sites, take a look around.”
Sam frowned. “At least stay in the damn car, would you? This thing seems to like its victims alone and out in the open.”
“You got it, Sammy. Too damn cold for hiking, anyway.”
--
Dean hadn’t lied, exactly. He’d really meant to stay in the car where it was warm and nothing wanted to kill him. But idling along a country road, his annotated map spread across the steering wheel, he started to notice a pattern. On paper, the freaky blizzards were scattered all over the map. Now that he’d seen a few of the locations, he realized some of them followed a route - not one marked by Rand McNally, but rutted old dirt roads between farms and fields that must have once been used by horses and wagons, and now looked to be traveled mainly by tractors and ATVs.
He grabbed a pencil from the glove box and sketched in a rough approximation of the paths he’d seen. Looked like the route would have begun in what passed for a town more than a century ago, near the old church and schoolhouse. From there it traversed several of the original adjoining homesteads.
As gung-ho as Sam was about his Pokemon demon, Dean found himself still skeptical. For some reason, this case didn’t have an exotic feel to it - felt more like a vengeful spirit, albeit an extremely pissed off one. Either way, there had to be some reason why these incidents were concentrated in one area, and these old roads were the closest thing he had to a real lead.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, mentally weighing actual risk versus pissed-off brother versus solving the case. He squinted up at the sky. Flurries drifted down, but nothing about the clouds looked threatening.
He dropped the Impala in gear. He’d check out the school first.
The ruins of the one-room schoolhouse sat a football field’s length away from the road, sagging sadly in the center of a snow-covered clearing. Maybe another quarter-mile distant was the old Mennonite church: white clapboard, squat and plain, no spires or crosses. The wrought iron fence, stark black against the snow, and a few half-buried humps and crosses of tombstones were all that was visible of the church graveyard.
Dean parked the Impala in a cleared turnaround just off the road. Armored in hat and gloves, his jacket zipped up to his chin, he grabbed his EMF meter and salt-loaded shotgun. He wasn’t expecting trouble, but like the Boy Scouts, he liked to be prepared.
He hiked out into the field, his boots sinking a couple of inches into what must have been at least a foot of snow. There was nothing to see for miles, just flat land, trees, the broken buildings. High in the western sky, a hawk slowly circled.
The schoolhouse was still filled with the detritus of its last students: warped wooden desks, cracked blackboard, the black barrel of a potbelly stove. The floor was littered with books, bloated and moldy. A tattered and water-stained world map fluttered along one wall.
Dean made a quick sweep for EMF, kicking rotting books out of the way to reach each corner. Nothing. He paused in the doorway, eyeing the church where it sat across the field. Wasn’t too far, really. He could make it there and back in no time. With one last look at the sky, he started out into the wide sea of white.
He was halfway across when the EMF meter squealed. Shit. The flurries picked up; a shadow blotted the sun. With a glance behind him, Dean realized the Impala and the two buildings were equidistant. He broke for the car.
The sky darkened and snow swirled thick around him. He hauled ass, fast as he could with his bum knee, ignoring the burn in his chest as he sucked in cold air against bruised ribs.
The Impala’s black lines were barely visible when he skidded around the bumper and wrenched open the door. He threw himself inside, slammed the door behind him. Outside, wind whipped the snow, rocked the car on its wheels.
Okay, so that didn’t go exactly as planned. Dean clutched the shotgun, tried to catch his breath. Looked like he wasn’t going anywhere for a while. He couldn’t see a thing beyond the wall of white. Couldn’t shoot since he didn’t know where to aim. He wrestled his cell phone out of his pocket. No signal.
The wind howled, battered the car, but he wasn’t freezing. Yet. If the accounts they’d heard were right, he’d be fine if he just stayed put for the next half hour.
He was never gonna hear the end of this from Sam.
--
By the time Dean’s key turned in the lock, Sam had been pacing the room in alternating worry and rage for over two hours. At least Dean had the good sense to look chagrined, eyebrows pulled together in apology, offering a sheepish grin.
Sam knew he looked like some ridiculous-ass schoolmarm, but couldn’t help it: he crossed his arms, pursed his lips. “You didn’t stay in the car, did you?”
Dean sat on the edge of his bed, peeled off his hat and gloves, leaving his hair in an impressive state of disarray. “Nope. I saw it, Sam, and whatever it was, it was pretty pissed off.”
He blew into his cupped hands, then tucked them into his armpits, his jacket still zipped. For the first time, Sam noticed how red his face was, how he tried to control a shiver but failed. “Jesus, Dean.” Sam grabbed the bedspread from his own bed, wrapped it around Dean’s shoulders. “Did you get caught outside in that shit?”
“Hauled ass back to the car when I realized what was happening. The floor show lasted about twenty minutes. I waited a bit to see if it would come back, but it must have shot its wad.” Dean grinned, shrugged. “Y’know, so to speak.”
Dean relayed the rest of his story while Sam got the complimentary coffeemaker going. The account was nearly identical to Torbor’s version of events. “Two feet of snow?” Sam said. “How the hell did you get out?”
“Pulled the ol’ Bo Duke, climbed out the window. Got the shovel out of the trunk and started digging.”
“I’m sure that was good for your shoulder.” Sam found the amber bottle of Vicodin amidst the clutter on the table, tossed it to Dean.
“Yeah, I’ll probably be feeling it once I thaw out.” He swallowed two pills, shucked his clothes for a hot shower. By the time he was done, redressed in layers of thermal, denim, and flannel, the coffee was done. He downed one cup fast. Sam poured him another.
“So, I called Bobby to see if he knew anything about the yuki-onna,” Sam said. “He just laughed, told me I needed to start with the most obvious answer instead of the least.”
“Yeah? You tell him your spider theory?”
“I might have mentioned it. I think his exact words were, ‘ooh, I hate those little bastards.’ ”
“So no Pokemon demon. I’m kind of disappointed. We thinking vengeful spirit now?”
Sam sighed. “If it’s a spirit, it’s gonna be a bitch to find. It’s not confined to a single location. There were no infamous murders or massacres or battles. And this is hard country, man - a lot of people have died in tragic ways. How’re we gonna narrow it down?”
Dean had stopped drinking his coffee and now seemed to be simply enjoying the warmth, both hands wrapped around the mug, eyelids half-mast in a way that told Sam the drugs were kicking in. “I dunno, man,” he said, lazy drawl lengthening with fatigue and narcotics. “Guess we gotta hit the books.”
Sam picked up buffalo wings for dinner - the atomic variety for Dean, the smell of which cleared Sam’s sinuses from across the room - and they did their best to avoid smearing sauce all over their research. They split the day’s library haul down the middle, two big stacks of papers and books, and got to work.
When Sam researched, the world narrowed down to the materials in front of him, everything arranged in an order only he understood, from file folders to newspaper clippings to his supply of meticulously sharpened Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencils. Certain words leapt up from each page. Some asked to be written down. Some he slid into mental files. Others overlapped with snatches of memory. None this evening, however, were what he needed.
Pencil clenched between his teeth, he leaned back, raked his hands through his hair. Nothing in the research so far stood out. He had the distinct feeling of getting nowhere fast.
He glanced over at Dean, who sat on his bed frowning down at a book. Come to think of it, Sam thought Dean had been staring at that same book for a while now. Sam found a crumpled yellow page of discarded notes, lobbed it overhand at Dean’s head.
Dean looked up. “What?”
“You’ve been stuck on the same book for a long time. Just wanted to make sure you’re awake.”
“Got caught up.” Dean looked back down at the page. “Sam, I think we got something here. Remember the name on that homestead, the one the Heitzmans’ place was a part of?”
Sam shuffled through his notes. “Uh…Bittner?”
“Bittner,” Dean confirmed. He handed Sam the book, held open to one page with a finger.
Sam glanced at the cover: The Children’s Blizzard. It was one of the titles he’d picked up in desperation, checking out any books that had anything to do with snow and local history. He turned back to the marked page, scanned for the name, started to read.
The book related the story of the blizzard of January 12, 1888, when the temperature dropped eighteen degrees in three minutes and the windchills reached forty below that night. The storm had surprised prairie residents on what had been the first mild day in weeks, catching farmers doing chores and errands that had been put off because of weather, catching children as they were dismissed from school. People had died yards from safety, unable to see through the blinding snow or to rouse themselves after a final collapse. Some bodies weren’t recovered until the spring thaw.
Right away, Sam knew why Dean had gotten involved in the book. One story told of a teenage boy who had died with his arms wrapped around his little brother. Their bodies were frozen together, had to thaw for days before their family could fit them in coffins.
Two sisters, ages eight and thirteen, froze together facedown. When their bodies were found four days later, searchers saw that the older girl had wrapped her own shawl around her sister.
And the Bittner brothers, Jacob and Johann, spent the night huddled together in a hollowed-out snowbank. Johann, six years old, died in the night. Jacob, ten, lived till morning, but died of ventricular fibrillation - rewarming shock - after staggering only a few steps toward home.
“Damn.” Sam set the book down. “You think it’s one of the Bittner kids.”
“Yes I do.” Dean clicked through TV channels restlessly, didn’t look at Sam.
“Lemme guess. You think it’s the older one, pissed off ’cause he couldn’t save his little brother.”
“Yes I do.” CNN. SportsCenter. Home shopping. CSI.
“No transference there,” Sam muttered.
The TV clicked off. “Sam.” It was a serious tone that Sam rarely heard. It made him listen up. Made him meet Dean’s eyes. “Those brothers,” Dean said, “went to that school. That church. And they died between there and that old house on the Heitzmans’ land. Most of the blizzards were on their family’s homestead. The others were on their neighbors’ land. Their cousins’ land. Their grandparents’ land. What more do you need?”
Sam rolled his pencil between his fingertips. “Pretty pissed-off spirit for a ten-year-old kid.”
“You know as well as I do, Sam - sometimes the kids are the worst.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Sam sighed. “Guess I was just hoping for the Pokemon demon.”
Dean snorted, grinned. Apology accepted. He clicked the TV back on. Settled on an X-Files rerun. “Guess we can torch ’em both just to be safe.”
“If we can find ’em. They may have been buried in the church cemetery, but a lot of burials at the time would have been at home.”
Dean just shook his head, eyes hooded, a smug curl to his lips. “We’ll find ’em.”
“I know you’re good at finding graves.” Scary good, really, Sam thought. “But under a foot of snow?”
“Hey, you got your shining, I got mine.”
Sam made a face.
“Well,” Dean admitted with a laugh, “there may have been a newspaper account that gave a general location of the graves.”
Sam fired another ball of paper Dean’s way.
Part Three