Fic: The Hessian of the Hollow: Part II

[jedisapphire]

Masterpost
Part I

Part II: Sammy, I’m Cold

“This place is sweet,” Dean said happily, looking around the room.

The beds were big and piled with mounds of pillows, the curtains were thick enough that random rays of sunlight wouldn’t wake them in the morning - and that was an important consideration when your job frequently involved late-night grave desecration - and, most importantly, the power outlets were all the way across the room from the beds, meaning Sam’s insomniac clickety-clickety-clickety wouldn’t keep Dean up all night.

Sam dropped his duffel on his bed and glanced at Dean. “I think this is even the same room Max and Fred had.”

“Awesome. So if any horsemen, headless or otherwise, come plunging through that wall -”

“He saw it on the road like fifty miles away, Dean.”

“Did you find any other cases?”

“So now you want to hear about my research?”

Sam sounded pissed enough that Dean knew he wasn’t faking it. He made a face. “Come on, Sammy. Don’t be a bitch.”

“I tried to tell you on the drive over.”

“Yeah, but -”

“Twice.”

“Oh, come on, man. Look, the first time was when Ride the Lightning was playing and the second time there was that car with the college chicks - did you not see them? And the blonde was yelling her number at me through the window.”

Sam rolled his eyes and pulled out his laptop, stalking away to the corner to plug it in. Dean followed.

“OK, look, I’m paying attention now.” He sat across the table, pulled out his phone, his other phone, and his other other phone and shoved them all at Sam. “You can keep those. See? This is me paying attention. Now tell me what you found out.”

Sam glared a moment more, but then he sat down, put his notes on top of the keyboard, and tilted the screen so Dean could see.

“Fred’s isn’t the only case,” Sam said. “I checked out all the medical databases. There have been four other incidents that I could find, all in the last fifteen years, all within a fifty-mile radius of Sleepy Hollow.”

“So it really is the Headless Horseman?”

“It could be. Nobody else has reported seeing a rider, so that part could just be Fred’s imagination, but there’s definitely something. Of course, if it is the Headless Horseman, we have no idea why he waited this long to start going after people.”

“He went after Ichabod Crane.”

Sam waved a dismissive hand. “Ichabod Crane scared himself to death. And even if the Horseman was involved, that was just one person, one time, years ago. Why would he suddenly wake up again now?”

“What about the other cases?”

“Right.” Sam looked at his notes. “The first one we have on record is Cody Baker. Fifteen years ago, he was thirty at the time. He was out walking the dog, fog came down suddenly, he couldn’t see where he was going, took a spill, and hit his head. Had it checked out at the local clinic - according to their records, he was mildly concussed, but not injured in any other way. Went home and was fine all day, but he woke up the next morning completely blind.”

“And the doctors couldn’t figure anything out?”

“No. His hearing went the next day, and the day after that his ability to speak. Doctors thought it might be some sort of delayed reaction to his fall, maybe he’d taken brain damage that hadn’t manifested right away. His wife engaged a therapist for him. He worked with her for two weeks and then disappeared one night. They launched a manhunt and two days later they found his body, decapitated.” Sam swallowed, looking a little queasy. “They never found his head.”

“And they never caught anyone for the murder?”

Sam shook his head.

“Who else?” Dean asked.

“A couple of years after Baker, a guy called Abe Goldberg. Forty-two. Driving home from work, caught in fog. He waited it out in his car and then drove home. No injury of any kind, he didn’t even stub his toe… But, well, same thing.”

“He still alive?”

“His son found him in the bathtub a month later. Jury ruled an accidental overdose of prescription medication.” Sam flipped over a page. “Six years ago, Alexander Barnes, twenty-three. He and his girlfriend were on their way back from a party when the fog came down. She was fine. He… Same thing. Threw himself off the roof of their house. He lived fourteen days on a ventilator before his family decided to pull the plug.”

“Damn,” Dean breathed, gaze flickering to Sam and away.

“Last one - well, last one until Fred - was last year. A… hitchhiker, apparently, known only as Todd. He got a ride with a woman driving to New York, they got caught in fog and waited it out, but apparently he felt a little queasy so she dropped him off at a hospital and then went on her way. He panicked when he woke up blind and had to be repeatedly sedated; by the time it all wore off he’d lost the ability to speak. No ID, so they never found out his last name. They released him to Social Services and he stayed at a shelter for… special cases. Found knifed in the kitchen. They couldn’t pin it on anyone though they had a couple of suspects.”

“And you couldn’t find anything before the Cody guy?”

“Nothing… So it’s possible he did something to… I don’t know. To wake the ghost up?”

“Maybe. We’ll figure it out.” Dean thought of Fred, and of Max’s voice trembling on the phone earlier when he’d told Dean his cousin had gone mute. “We will figure it out.”

He was being a girl, but this was personal now, more personal than their cases usually were. If they hadn’t found it the way they had, if Max and Fred hadn’t come to his notice while he’d been filling out a hospital form with a half-conscious Sam making little snuffling sounds into his shirt, if Fred hadn’t been just the right age for Dean to look at him and feel his insides twist with fear for his baby brother, it might have been different.

Sam just nodded at him, though Dean knew he didn’t entirely get it.

“We’re meeting Cody Baker’s wife first. Come on, it’ll take us an hour to get there.”
Ashley Baker was now Ashley Harris, mother of three. She wasn’t particularly happy to see Agent Smith and Agent Wesson, and she didn’t know why the FBI wanted to reopen a fifteen-year-old investigation anyway.

Dean rolled his eyes at Sam behind her back, and Sam grinned and let him handle it.

“I understand you don’t want to rake up the past,” Dean said in a matter-of-fact voice. She looked like the kind of woman who’d rather have that than sympathetic understanding. “And we’re not going to take a lot of your time. We just need to make sure nothing’s happened since then that could give us any clue to who killed your husband.”

“I don’t know what you expect me to say,” she snapped, running a hand through her short, platinum blonde hair. “If I’d remembered anything, don’t you think I would have called the cops?”

“Maybe something that didn’t seem important?” Dean suggested. “Please, just go over the events of that day with us, and then we’ll leave you alone.”

She sighed, waving them into chairs at the kitchen table. “You have half an hour. Then I need to take my daughter to her piano lessons.”

Dean waited for Sam to sit before tugging his chair closer to his brother’s and dropping into it. “So… Maybe we should start with the details of his… accident? It’s possible it might be related… I understand Mr. Baker was walking the dog?”

“He always did. It was the morning routine, he and Rusty would go out, they’d be back in time for breakfast and then we - Cody and I - would both go to work. He was late. I wasn’t too worried. Rusty was young and curious and always getting his nose in stuff. I left Cody a note and went to work.”

“And you next heard from him…”

“He called from the clinic. I had one meeting I absolutely couldn’t miss, and he was going to stay for some tests, so as soon as that was over I went to the clinic to pick him up. They said he was mildly concussed but the doctor thought he’d be fine. We went home, he seemed all right, so I didn’t think much of it. We had lunch, watched some bad movie, I don’t even remember which one. He was fine by dinnertime and we went to bed early, we both had work the next day.”

“Was there any specific place Mr. Baker liked to go when he walked the dog?” Sam asked.

“Does it matter?”

“You never know what might be important.”

“He just… Sort of walked around. We had this lovely old place, got it cheap because it was a fixer-upper. Few miles out of town, and it was right next to the cemetery - you know, the one all the tourists love.”

“The Old Dutch Church burying ground?” Sam asked.

“That’s the one. I thought it was a little creepy, but Cody liked to walk through it - and Rusty didn’t care, of course, so sometimes they went there. It was about half a mile from our house, and they’d take a longer loop back. Other times they’d go through the woods and over the creek.”

“Do you know where Mr. Baker went that day?”

“I don’t know. With everything else that happened I never asked him.”

“Did he…” Dean studied her for a moment, nodded and resumed. “Did he mention seeing anything unusual on his walk that day?”

“Unusual?”

“He may have been witness to a crime,” Sam suggested. “Something that made someone want to get him out of the way.”

“Oh. Well… No, not that I remember. Nothing.”

But there was something in her voice - she was lying.

Dean glanced at Sam. They’d gotten as far as cool professionalism could take them. Now it was Sam’s job to get the rest of the story.

“Are you sure?” Sam said gently. “It might not even have seemed important at the time -”

“Yes.”

“Or, I don’t know, maybe he saw something but didn’t understand, so it might have sounded crazy.”

“No,” Ashley said, but she sounded less emphatic about it this time.

Dean suppressed a grin. Yahtzee.

“Could you maybe just think about it?” Sam coaxed. “He was clearly under a lot of stress so it might not have made sense, but…”

Ashley sighed. “Fine. I don’t know how you guessed, but you’re right. There was… It sounds completely crazy, and I couldn’t tell anyone. Cody was barely holding it together as it was, with losing his sight and hearing and - well - I didn’t want them to put him in an institution. And then it didn’t matter.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he saw a ghost.”
“I guess it’s possible.”

Sam took the beer Dean handed him. Ever since the incident with Jed, Dean had implemented a Big brother gets the drinks rule. He didn’t know how long Sam would let him get away with it, but for the moment he seemed willing to play along.

“What’s possible?” Dean asked, flipping his chair and sitting astride it.

“What Ashley said.” He made a cross on a map he’d printed out, turning it to show Dean. “She was right about their old place being close enough to the Headless Horseman’s cemetery. Maybe he has a grave there and her husband… Disturbed it, somehow. Woke him up.”

“Really? You think the guy would have been into grave desecration?”

“He might not have known. It could’ve been an accident. Maybe he was walking through the cemetery and just… tripped over something, or found something. He might not even have realized he woke the ghost.”

“And it woke up and saw him and went for him. Could be. But… Have we got any idea which one is the Headless Horseman’s grave? A name, or the date he died, anything?”

“He was allegedly a Hessian from the Revolutionary War, so… sometime then? But it might not be a marked grave. I doubt Cody Baker would’ve interfered with one of those. Maybe he got killed in the war and they just buried him in an unmarked grave. Might’ve done that, especially if he was an enemy soldier and they didn’t know his name.”

Dean nodded. “Might not even be inside the present boundary of the cemetery.”

“That’s true. I mean, according to the story, he haunts it, but he might be just along the wall outside, or across the street. And, I mean, maybe it wasn’t even a supernatural fog that first time. It might just have been normal fog.”

“Then when he took a fall he accidentally disturbed the Hessian’s grave.”

Dean grinned at Sam, and Sam smiled back the way he did when things made sense to his geek mind. They clinked their beer bottles together, but before either of them could drink they heard a voice off to the left.

“Well, well. Look who we have here.”

He had a feeling he’d heard that voice before, but it wasn’t until Dean looked up and saw the person standing there that a scowl came over his face.

“Jed.”

“Well, well,” the man said again, with an unpleasant smile. “What are you doing with this kid?”

“We were going the same way,” Dean said coolly. “So we decided to ride together. Easier on him than taking the bus.”

“Thought you’d get yourself a boy toy? Little innocent like that, must’ve been irresistible. And easy.”

Sam stiffened, and Dean took an angry step forward.

“You ever think about sharing?” Jed drawled.

Dean’s fist was out before he even knew he’d moved, and then Jed was on the ground, clutching his jaw and lying in the wreckage of one of the chairs.

“Man,” he grunted. “Lighten up.”

Dean tensed, ready to fling himself on Jed and pummel his face until he stopped talking, because suddenly it all made a horrible kind of sense. He’d assumed the son of a bitch had drugged Sam just to beat him up and get his money back, maybe snatch Sam’s wallet in the process, but this -

This -

And Sammy, who despite being big as a house and strong as an ox had all the unsuspecting innocence of the kid he still sometimes was -

“Dean.” Sam was holding him back, and damn the kid was strong. Dean was stronger, though, because that son of a bitch had threatened his baby brother and -

“Dean,” Sam said firmly. “Dean, it’s OK. I’m fine. He didn’t touch me. And I can take care of myself, Dean. I’m not drugged now, and if he lays a hand on me he’ll know exactly how well I can take care of myself.”

“He lays a hand on you,” Dean growled, “I’ll kill him.”

Sam rolled his eyes, but he let Dean get between him and Jed as the other man got to his feet.

“Who told you where to find us?” Dean demanded.

“Kristie - you remember her? She gave you her number, and you were making nice with her until you decided to take this one home instead. Said she’d seen you drive past the bar in the morning, still with him in the passenger seat. Told me which direction you’d gone.”

“You’ve been following us?” Sam asked.

“I asked at gas stations along the way. Two guys in a muscle car, that doesn’t go unnoticed.” Jed pointed at Sam. “Kid’s got something of mine. I want it back, and maybe a little compensation for making me drive all this way, and then we can part as friends. It’s as good a deal as he could ever get. You didn’t take anything from me. I’ll leave you alone.”

“Neither did he,” snarled Dean. “You touch him and I’ll -”

“Dean,” Sam interrupted. “It’s OK.”

“What, are you crazy? This guy tried to -”

“I know.” Sam nodded at Jed. “I’m really not sorry about that night. I might’ve been willing to return your money, but you tried to drug me. You’re an idiot.”

He said it all in the same reasonable tone he used to talk to witnesses, and Dean had to repress a sudden urge to laugh. Jed looked like he didn’t know whether to go for furious or bewildered.

“Come on, Dean.”

“But I haven’t kicked his ass yet,” Dean protested when Sam tried to pull him away.

“Dean. We don’t have time for this. We can’t get involved with the police. We know he’s around. I’ll be careful, and he’s like half my size. Come on.”
“That’s weird,” Sam said, frowning down at his laptop.

“What? Dude, I haven’t been near the thing, so if it’s stuck or got some virus then -”

“No, the laptop’s fine. The power socket’s vanished.”

“What?” Dean dropped the TV remote to the bedside table and pushed himself to his feet. “Sammy, if this is some stupid trick to keep me from enjoying these mattresses -”

“No, I’m serious, Dean!”

Sam sounded more than a little freaked, and Dean strode quickly across the room. “What’s the matter, princess?”

“I left my laptop plugged in and now the socket’s disappeared. It’s gone, Dean.”

Dean bent to look.

Sam was right. His laptop had been plugged in earlier, Dean remembered that too. And now the power cord was looped neatly around the adaptor and on the table, and the wall socket had… vanished. The wall was smooth, untouched wood panelling that looked like it had never even seen a nail.

“Huh.” Dean bent and felt at the wall. It was solid. “You think the Horseman could’ve Freaky Fridayed our room?”

“We don’t even know if it is the Hessian at all.” At the look Dean shot him, Sam shrugged. “Maybe the deaths are, but this doesn’t make sense, Dean. Why would he do that?”

“Why would he do any of this? Ghosts killing people, I get, but he’s not killing them.”

“They all died.”

“And those could just have been random accidents or suicide or whatever.”

“Cody Baker said he saw the Horseman and he was decapitated.”

“Yeah, but… Look, just plug the damn laptop in somewhere else and let’s… Sam.” Dean clutched at Sam’s arm.

“Dude! What?”

“The remote.” Dean pointed at the bedside table where it had been. “I put it down there, like, a minute ago. And…” His gaze swivelled around to the television set he’d been about to turn on. “The TV’s gone too.”

Sam snatched up his laptop and held it protectively to his chest. “We need another motel.”

“Screw that. We can sleep in the Impala. Come on.”

They grabbed their bags and hurried out of the room, the motel changing and shifting around them as they did. Dean went for the stairs, not wanting to risk the elevator disappearing with them inside it. He hurtled down, Sam behind him, and practically ran out the door.

They turned to look back when they were outside.

It was the same, and different. When they’d come in it had been old-fashioned, and a little decayed. The paint had been peeling in places, the curtains had been just the wrong side of well-used. The cobbles on the path leading up to the main entrance had been worn by age and use.

It was the same paint and the same curtains, but now they were brand new, walls bright, curtains fresh and wafting a faint smell of lavender as they fluttered in the breeze, the cobbles still with some hard, sharp edges.

The Impala was still in the lot.

They dived into it, and Dean barely waited to hear Sam’s door slam before he put it in gear and peeled out.

The motel had been the only building in a three-mile radius, but as they drove the landscape changed. There were storefronts and a couple of little stone-and-brick cottages and a church and an old-fashioned school. Dean thought he saw people in the windows, but they didn’t come out.

Then there was a figure on the street in front of them.

“Dean, it’s the guy from the bar -”

“Yeah, I know,” Dean grunted, swerving hard to avoid the figure. It was one of Jed’s friends. Dean hadn’t bothered to find out their names. He’d probably come up with Jed, and it had never occurred to Dean that the son of a bitch might have tracked them to the motel. He was going to have to find Jed and put the fear of Dean Winchester into him.

“Wait!” the guy yelled, holding out a hand.

Dean ignored him.

“Dean!” Sam said, turning to look.

Dean gritted his teeth. Was Sam out of his freaking mind? This was the guy who’d probably helped Jed drug him, who might’ve been planning to -

Dean didn’t let himself finish the thought, because then he’d be out of the car and pounding some sense into the sons of bitches who thought they could target Dean’s baby brother.

“This isn’t the time to be a hippie, Sam,” he snapped.

A sign appeared off to the left to tell him they were leaving the town of High Falls and - what the hell? What town of High Falls? There had been nothing here, not even ruins, just a lone motel a mile off the highway.

Sam was twisted in his seat, staring behind them.

“Dean -”

“Shut up, Sam.”

“Dean, please. Stop!”

Dean drove another fifty yards just to prove he wasn’t a pushover who gave in to his brother’s every whim, and then he braked. “What, Sammy?”

Sam said nothing, but his eyes were wide with horror.

Dean turned to look.

The guy was standing just level with the sign for the town limits, hands held out in front of him as though he was pushing against some invisible barrier. His mouth was moving like he was screaming, but Dean couldn’t hear anything -

And then the storefronts began to fade, piece by piece, like a disappearing jigsaw puzzle.

Jed’s friend flickered out of existence for a second, and then back.

“Oh God,” Sam gasped, reaching for the door handle.

“Sam!” Dean protested. “What the hell are you doing? We don’t know what’s going on!”

He reached for Sam, just too late. Sam was out of the car, and Dean got out after him. Even outside the car, he couldn’t hear the guy screaming, though he obviously was. “Get back inside, moron!”

“Dean, we have to help him.”

Sam took a step forward -

And all of a sudden everything was obscured in whiteness.
The fog rose like soup, almost solid. Sam couldn’t see an inch. He felt the dampness in his lungs and reached automatically to where he’d last seen his brother.

“Dean?” he called - softly, just in case someone else was listening.

“Sam!”

“Dean.” He took a step in the direction of the voice, and a moment later his fingers were brushing Dean’s jacket. “Dean.”

“Yeah.” Even this close, Dean was just an indistinct shadow in front of Sam’s face. Sam felt a hand on his shoulder, and then it slid down his arm to squeeze his wrist and then clutch his hand. “Don’t get any ideas,” Dean said, when Sam snickered. “We can’t afford to get separated in this thing, that’s all.” He hesitated. “You’re the one with a GPS tracker in your head, which way’s the Impala?”

Sam thought for a moment, and then tugged Dean to his right. “That way.”

He took a couple of cautious steps, his free hand held out in front of him - and there, there was the familiar cool metal. He pulled Dean forward, and Dean squeezed his hand tighter for a moment before releasing it.

“Good job, Sammy. Get in.”

Sam felt his way around to the passenger side, sliding in just as Dean scrambled into the driver’s seat.

They shifted together almost without meaning to, because they couldn’t drive anywhere when they couldn’t see. They could just sit -

“Dean,” Sam whispered, more out of habit than anything else.

- shoulder-to-shoulder in the Impala -

“We just need to stay put and wait for it to lift,” Dean said, and Sam could tell he was trying to sound more confident than he felt.

- waiting -

Something moved in the mist, and Sam’s breath caught.

- for what they knew was coming.

And there in front of them, indistinct, wreathed in fog, was a tall figure on a shadowy horse.

“No,” Sam gasped, and then the Horseman was riding towards them, and they ducked down together, tucking themselves under the dashboard, and the air was full of screaming and thundering hooves.

And then there was silence.

“Dean.”

“Sam,” Dean gasped, and something in his brother’s voice made Sam turn sharply.

“Dean?”

“Sammy, he touched me. He… He rode through, and he touched me.”

“Dean.”

“Sammy, I’m cold.”

Part III