SPN FIC - Best Kept Hidden
From weesta's prompt: Dean enjoys the hell out of exploring the Batcave until he comes across a door he can't open. It's a plain slab of steel with no handle, but it does have hinges - clearly it was meant to be opened. Man VS Door and Dean is determined to be victorious!
"I measured," Dean said.
CHARACTERS: Dean and Sam
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: Up through 8.16
LENGTH: 4800 words
BEST KEPT HIDDEN
By Carol Davis
"So? What do you think?"
Sam stretched out a hand and ran it along the edge of the metal plate, thumb tracing the groove between the plate and the rest of the wall. He frowned for a minute, let out a soft "Hmm," then went back to frowning.
"I measured," Dean said.
"And?"
Dean showed him the big yellow Stanley tape measure he'd brought in from the car. "I checked the width of the rooms on either side. There's a gap in between, right where this is." He rapped the plate with a knuckle. "Decent sized. Close to nine feet unaccounted for."
They'd walked past the plate any number of times. It stretched from the floor almost to the hallway's low ceiling; was four feet wide, give or take. Steel, Dean guessed, though it had an odd sheen to it, and a brushed texture that made it look decorative rather than functional - the reason he and Sam had paid it little attention during the month-and-change they'd been here. Only boredom (spiced with a little curiosity) had prompted him to investigate it further.
"No hinges," Sam pointed out.
"Could be on the inside."
"Then what's the point? A door you can't open? What does that accomplish?" Before Dean could answer, Sam asked, "Did you check the other side?"
"It backs up on the boiler room."
"And there's no door in there."
"No."
"It could just be - I don't know. A closet full of ductwork or something."
"And they put that" - Dean nodded at the plate - "in front of it?"
"They stuck a sink and a medicine cabinet in the middle of their war room, like ten steps away from the bathroom. Who knows why anybody does anything, man. Maybe they had a big chunk of steel left over from something, and somebody just stuck it there on a whim."
"So you don't care what's behind it."
Shrugging, Sam rapped on the plate. Rapped a second time, harder, then tested a different spot. The plate sounded thick, sturdy, solid.
Like it was meant to protect something, maybe.
The two of them stood there in silence for a while, staring at the plate.
As Dean could have predicted, Sam twitched first. "I should get back to work," he said. "Durand's diary really looks like it's got some stuff Kevin can use. I should try to get through this one entry, see what he's got to say about -"
"Go," Dean told him.
"You sure?"
"You're probably right. Maybe they stuck this thing on the wall because the pipes made too much noise or something, and they wanted to block the sound. You know how it is. Old ductwork - damn stuff rattles like crazy. It kept 'em awake, or messed with their concentration, or - whatever. Go. Do your geek thing."
"I can -"
"Sam. Go. Translate."
Brains versus brawn had nothing to do with it, Dean thought as his brother walked away; it was a question of whether puzzles were best solved sitting in a chair, leaning over an old book, or by moving around, examining, touching, testing. Thumping the thing with a variety of tools: his fist, a hammer (covered with the thumb of an old mitten, to avoid denting the steel, because, all right, it was pretty, in a way), then with a rubber mallet; then testing it with the temperature sensor, the EMF meter, half a dozen magnets of different sizes, and finally, listening to it with the stethoscope Dean had carted out of the hospital the last time he and Sam had pretended to be doctors.
Nothing said the plate was anything but decorative.
Still, there was that gap behind it.
There would have been little use for a secret passageway in a place whose entire existence was a secret, or for a safe room in a place warded against every kind of evil.
What there was a use for, it seemed to Dean, was a repository for seriously bad mojo.
Things that could whisper.
Things that could kill.
He'd found nothing like that down here, or anywhere else in the Letters' sanctuary. The weapons and talismans and charms displayed in the library were mostly benign, things with very little juice, if they had any at all. Sure, the Men of Letters might have steered clear of bringing anything dangerous down to their lair, might well have buried it elsewhere, but if this was the safest place in the world, the place most impervious to anyone or anything that'd have a use for some supernatural nukes… then it made sense to bring it here.
To lock it up, down here.
Somewhere.
He tried running the tip of a heavy screwdriver along the groove at the edge of the plate, but of course, the thing was far too heavy to be shifted by something as fragile as a screwdriver. When he toted in the crowbar from the car, Sam blinked at him and raised an eyebrow, but when Dean waved him off, he went willingly back to his book.
The crowbar didn't budge the thing, either.
"Dude," Sam said when Dean brought in the blowtorch, "promise me you're not gonna burn the place down."
"A little faith, huh?" Dean said.
"Blowtorch?" Sam said. "Really?"
Dean pointed to Durand's diary, and to Sam's notebook, lying beside it. "Translate. I know what I'm doing."
All the blowtorch did was scorch the metal.
And.
Well.
Leave kind of a deep, smelly, blackened rut in the wall alongside the big steel plate.
Bothered, Dean went around to the boiler room and explored the wall that backed up on whatever was behind the plate. Because there was something behind it, dammit. The boiler room didn't run deep enough to reach the plate itself; a little work with the tape measure, and some notes scrawled on a scrap of paper, determined that there was a good eight feet of unaccounted-for space in there - a good eight feet square of unaccounted-for space.
Dean had broken a good-sized hole in the plaster of the boiler room wall and had raised his sledgehammer for another blow when Sam appeared in the doorway, Durand's diary in hand, all the hair on the left side of his head pushed crazy (bedhead in the middle of the day) from the way he'd been resting his head on his non-writing hand.
"You gonna fix that, if there's nothing in there?" Sam asked mildly.
"I could - yeah. I guess so."
"You need a hobby, man."
Chuckling under his breath, and shaking his messed-up head, Sam turned and walked away. Dean watched him go, sledgehammer dangling from his hand.
You need a hobby.
Sure.
Because there was nothing at all useful in finding out that there was a wall behind the wall. A gap of a little less than six inches (full of wiring and some plumbing, and the 2x4 framing), then another damned wall - and that second one was steel, not plaster.
There was an eight-foot steel cube in there, for no good reason.
Or maybe, the best reason in the world.
He considered, briefly, calling Sam back and showing him what was in there, but the two of them working at it - nah.
They'd agreed three weeks ago, mostly informally, that Sam's job was to go through all the books, to catalog them, flip through the ones that seemed most useful, then to begin translating anything that wasn't in English. Dean's job - mostly because it didn't involve sitting at a damn table all day long - was to organize the other stuff: the weapons, the charms, the talismans, the potions and herbs and mystical ingredients. There wasn't a whole lot of that; clearly, the Men of Letters had felt it better to leave the collection and storage of the Magical Mystery stuff to the keepers of shops around the world, within easy reach of hunters who might need to cast a quick spell.
There was some, though, down here in the lair.
Stuff the Letters would need for their crazy ceremonies, maybe.
Things they didn't trust to anybody else.
So: find it. Open the door. Take a look. Make a list. Then, do the big "Tah Dah!" and unveil it for Sam.
Completely doable.
Sensible.
No need for the two of them to work on this, particularly when Durand's diary needed to be translated, and any useful information in it passed on to Kevin, so the poor kid could finish working on the damn tablet and get his life back.
Frowning, Dean put his hand through the gap in the wall and probed the expanse of steel he'd uncovered.
No way to break through it from out here, not without some serious firepower.
Leaving the sledgehammer on the floor of the boiler room, alongside an impressive heap of crumbled plaster, he made his way back to that fancy door-like thing and stood pondering it with his dusty hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans.
There was a chance, of course, that it wasn't a door at all, but simply the side of the cube; that the thing was solid, had been welded together, leaving no seams, no way to get inside - to get at what had been locked within it.
Then why include something that looked like a door?
He used the tip of the screwdriver to explore the groove around the edge of the plate: ran it slowly and gently all the way around, looking for evidence of hinges, or a keyhole. For anything at all, really. When he'd made a full circuit he tried it again.
Nothing.
"Need a friggin' missile," he muttered. "Low-level tactical nuke."
Or you could…
Nah.
Couldn't be that simple.
But with that bunch of elitist douchebags, and the secret ceremonies Henry had described - the ones involving red velvet robes and the chanting and "levels of knowledge"? A lot of it, Sam had pointed out, was similar to the goings-on of every other secret society people had cooked up over the centuries - a lot of foolishness and mumbo-jumbo.
Game-playing, that's what it was, and that didn't make it a whole lot different from what Charlie and her buddies had been doing out in that field, pretending they were on "Moondor."
Dean glanced over his shoulder, toward the stairs leading up to the library, where Sam was undoubtedly still bent over his old book, scribbling notes, frowning at phrases that were a little troublesome. He wouldn't want to be called away from what he was doing, not when the ultimate goal, here, was closing the gates of Hell. This wasn't Sammy working on some book report, or a paper on the shifts in European merchant society during the Crusades.
This was big stuff. Important stuff.
Dean took his hands out of his pockets. Nothing was likely to come busting out of there, but it was best to be prepared to fight.
Right?
Those snooty asshats wouldn't have locked anything alive in there.
He drew in a deep breath.
Better not to have Sam here; if this didn't work - and what Dean figured on doing was so lame and stupid, of course it wouldn't work - it was better not to have Sam standing there, making that face. That You made me get up from what I was doing, for THIS? face. True, Sam had been a whole shit-ton more agreeable and mellow down here than he'd been since… well, practically ever, but still. He was up there doing important stuff.
"Open," Dean said to the door.
He fully expected nothing to happen, because good God, this was lame.
But with the creak of long-unused hinges, the door began to swing inward.
For a moment, Dean didn't breathe. He'd been fully astonished by a good many things in his life, enough of them that the impact might well have been dulled, might have justifiably seemed like same old, same old.
But this?
There was nothing alive inside that small steel cube.
There was nothing in it at all.
Which meant… what? That there'd been something in there at one time, but the Letters had taken it out? Or that they'd built this room to contain something that hadn't arrived here before they were all killed? Puzzled, Dean reached out to rest a hand on the door and pushed it all the way open, as far as its concealed hinges would allow. There was no light fixture inside, no source of illumination, but enough light spilled in from the hallway that he could reassure himself that yes, the room was completely empty.
Not, however, undecorated.
All six surfaces inside - the four walls, the ceiling, and the floor - were liberally covered with runes and symbols, some of which Dean recognized and some he didn't. Some of them had been laid out in straight lines, others in spirals. They reminded Dean very much of the interior of that old barn he and Bobby had decorated to summon the being who turned out to be Cas, but this involved a lot of different symbols. Wrong symbols.
"Sam," Dean said.
Then, louder: "SAM!"
It was all a matter of vocal cues, he thought, because instead of calling back, "WHAT?" or ignoring him entirely, Sam came hustling down the stairs, bringing himself up short when he realized the door was open.
"How -?" he began, then abandoned the question in favor of peering in at the runes.
"Gonna need your help with this," Dean said. "I'm going in there. Need you to stand here and keep that door from slamming shut on me. Not really feeling like being trapped right now, you know?"
"Then don't -"
Shaking his head, Dean grabbed a flashlight from the pile of tools he'd brought in from the car and switched it on. He gave in to the urge to flick the beam at Sam's eyes, grinning at the predictable bitchface the tease created, then turned to direct the light inside the small, apparently unused room. This time he was prepared for something to happen, but nothing did.
"Be careful," Sam told him.
"Called you down here, didn't I?"
Unease fluttered through him as he walked past the threshold. As he'd calculated, the room was about eight feet square, so even standing at the far wall put him only a couple of steps from the door - but a lifetime of awkward (and often painful) experiences told him that getting out often wasn't as easy as it seemed, and he tossed a nod of gratitude to Sam for being there, whether or not this room proved to be nothing more than unused storage.
He was still smiling at his brother when the door flew shut.
"DEAN!" Sam bellowed from outside. "DEAN!"
His voice was muffled, as was the sound of his fists hammering against the steel.
"I'm okay!" Dean yelled back, a little annoyed at himself - and Sam - for not blocking the doorway with something the flying steel panel couldn't shove out of the way. "Just… hang on. I'm okay."
There was, after all, that open sesame trick.
And he would have tried it, would have bailed out of this situation (assuming the door would actually open a second time) if the runes hadn't started to glow. All at once, as if their power source had been flipped on, they turned from black to brilliant white to a warm gold, and seemed to grow out of the walls and ceiling and floor, becoming three-dimensional, seeming to float in the air several inches from the flat surfaces on which they'd been painted.
"DEAN?!?"
"HOLD ON," Dean shouted. "Just… cool your jets."
He was tempted to be nervous - hell, was tempted to indulge himself and be at least a little scared out of his wits - but the sense of wonder that had overcome him when the door opened reestablished itself, and he stood gaping at the glowing symbols like a child trying to make sense of a star-filled Montana sky. They seemed to grow as he stood there, overlapping each other, in a way that made him feel that his vision wasn't keen enough, that his mind might not be keen enough, to absorb enough of this to allow him to take part in… whatever this was.
That movie, his head told him.
Remember? That movie. With Jodie Foster. Where she goes in the thing and they drop it and she goes all apeshit and keeps saying, "Good to go! Good to go!" and she ends up in that other place that's all funky and her dad's there.
Like that.
Almost as if he had compelled them to do so, the runes continued to morph, taking on color and shape, blending from separate objects into a landscape, a continuous spread of light and dimension and texture.
He was inside an eight-foot steel cube, a good twenty feet below ground level.
He told himself that, firmly.
Ignoring everything his senses told him: sight, sound, smell.
Outside.
For a minute, his mind went on jabbering at him about Jodie Foster and aliens and secret codes, about weirdly-colored beaches and wormholes and dead fathers and multi-billion-dollar spaceship-type things.
Then it latched onto something else, and a grin spread across his face like water bubbling up out of the ground.
Holodeck.
Fuck me running, it's a damn holodeck!
"SAMMY!" he bellowed at the door. "Holy shit, man! You're not gonna believe this! Wait'll you see this, man!"
Sam didn't answer.
Didn't yell or pound on the door.
That worried Dean for a moment, but the easy answer was, Sam had run off to get something he could use to batter the door open. He'd figured the crowbar and the blowtorch and the other crap Dean had piled up out in the hall would be of no use, so he'd run up to the car to get something else - though what that might be, Dean couldn't imagine.
Really, it was difficult to care.
Heart fluttering inside his chest, he began to test the limits of the place - of this illusion, because that was certainly what it was. The rune-covered steel floor was only eight feet across, only two or three steps, but Dean began to walk at a tentative pace, then more normally, and the room let him keep going. He walked across a wide expanse of gently rolling, grassy earth, aware of its give and take beneath the soles of his boots, aware too of the scent of the grass, of the fresh, pungent smells of early spring, of the brush of a cool breeze against his face.
Somehow, at a time when there'd been very little in the way of modern technology (at least, as Dean thought of that term from a 2013 perspective), those crazy elitist sons of bitches had managed to create something that would turn up on a TV show as futuristic make-believe some thirty or forty years later.
But not by using technology, he reminded himself.
Using magic.
The thought made him stop walking; made him freeze where he was and look around.
He couldn't still be inside that room, magic or not. What lay around him was far too detailed, far too real.
He was coming to the edge of a city park, he realized, one that lay in the middle of a cluster of good-sized buildings, some of them ten or twelve stories high, some labeled as banks or hotels, others anonymous. Ordinary midday traffic filled the streets - cars, buses, cabs, a truck or two - and pedestrians made their way along the sidewalk, most of them in business attire, a few in more casual clothing.
One of them was Frank Devereaux.
Startled, Dean began moving again, shifting his pace into a trot so he could keep up with the man he and Sam had assumed was years dead. Devereaux wore the look of constipated distress that had been his most normal expression, but otherwise - and oddly - he seemed at ease. Comfortable with his surroundings, as if he'd been there for a good long while. "Frank?" Dean called out to him. "Yo! Hey! Frank!"
It wasn't surprising that Frank ignored him; calling out was probably unwise, especially if the man had assumed another identity, had gone into his own self-generated WITSEC.
What was surprising was that everyone else ignored Dean, too.
No one frowned.
No one looked for the source of his cries.
No one stepped aside to let him pass.
In fact, a man engrossed in typing a text on his cell phone walked right through him.
That brought Dean up short once again; prompted him to duck out of the flight path of the pedestrians, into a nook created by the indented wall of one of the buildings. From there, he could observe.
Could reach out to touch a polished granite wall that let his hand pass right on through.
So: not real, then.
He was still inside the steel room; it hadn't transported him somewhere else, someplace hundreds - maybe thousands - of miles from Lebanon, Kansas. Feeling somewhat let down, but at the same time intrigued, he moved out of the nook and hurried down the sidewalk in the direction Devereaux had taken, skirting quickly around everyone who stepped into his path. Frank couldn't have gone far, not in the few seconds that had elapsed - but he was gone. Nowhere to be seen.
Once again, Dean stopped moving.
He'd taken a breath or two, wondering if he should try to figure out which building Frank had entered, when the scenery around him began to change.
Morphed into another town, this one less cosmopolitan, more tourist-oriented. The buildings were smaller, only a few stories at best, and seemed to be mostly souvenir shops, small restaurants, bookshops, snack stands. The people moving in and out of the structures were dressed in lightweight, casual clothes, some of them in shorts and t-shirts, and they were toting cameras and beach gear, ice cream cones and soft drinks in paper cups instead of briefcases.
Among them was a teenage boy who looked familiar.
Jesse?
Older, yes, but then, several years had gone by since Dean had last seen the boy Cas had identified as being the Antichrist.
He looked content, but pensive.
Dean didn't bother trying to say anything to him.
Instead, he closed his eyes for a moment. Took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes, the room showed him Kevin, hard at work below decks on Garth's wreck of a houseboat, head bent low over his notebook, the hand holding his pencil tapping gently against the tabletop in time to music Dean couldn't hear.
Then the room showed him Jody Mills, behind the wheel of her sheriff's department cruiser, her left arm propped in the open driver's window, singing tunelessly along with whatever was playing on the radio as her car sailed on past Dean, who was standing at the side of the road.
It showed him Deacon, herding inmates off a bus at Green River Detention Center.
Showed him Charlie Bradbury, grinning broadly as she hammered away at the keyboard of a laptop.
Showed him Krissy Chambers and her dad, Diana Ballard, Kathleen Hudak, Barnes and Damien, Ed Zeddmore and Harry Spangler, Bobby's widowed friend Tamara, Haley Collins and Garth and Don Stark. Jamie the barmaid.
Showed him a dozen others, all alive and well.
It showed him Lisa and Ben.
Ben grown taller now, more slender, Lisa with a different hairstyle, the two of them bundled in warm jackets as they climbed into a car Dean didn't recognize. Nor did he recognize the house they'd walked out of, or the neighborhood. They'd moved again, then - maybe back near Lisa's sister. Were puzzled, maybe, over why they'd moved away in the first place. Puzzled over a lot of things.
With any luck, they didn't worry about it too much.
Couldn't, if Cas had done his job well.
Cas…?
Everyone alive and well - and Cas nowhere to be seen. "Where are you, man?" Dean murmured. "What's going on with you?"
All of them alive and well.
He stood and watched as Lisa and Ben drove away - off to a movie, maybe, or Lisa's sister's house, or a friend's. Shopping. To some community event, or a party. Some everyday thing.
Then he closed his eyes again.
Phone hooooome, he thought, his mind full of the little extraterrestrial's voice. A roomful of runes, buried deep underground, apparently constructed so that the men (and women?) who'd been in residence here could keep tabs on their loved ones without using the phone, without giving away their location to anyone anxious to trace them here. A way to be home, more or less, for people weary of being buried away from sunlight and fresh air.
"DEAN!" Sam roared from outside, his voice barely audible through the thick steel walls.
Dean let a minute go by, rubbing at his eyes with the flats of his fingers. He was nauseated, a little, by all of those rapidly-changing images - by being thrust from town to town, state to state, without actually going anywhere. There'd been a 360-degree "sensurround" experience at Disneyland, he remembered from a visit there with Dad and Sam, what seemed like a century ago: a rapid-fire tour across America, a full continent in three or four minutes, and this was something like that, on steroids. Or, maybe, the disorientation was partly due to the lack of air in here, to the claustrophobia of being locked underground.
Of being not There, but Here.
Not with any of those people, but separate. Invisible. As intangible as a ghost.
When Dean opened his eyes, the runes were once again nothing more than simple black symbols painted onto a plain steel surface; the room was lit only by the beam of the flashlight that had tumbled out of his hand onto the floor.
Suddenly weary, he took a step toward the door and told it softly, "Open."
Sam all but leaped at him as the door swung open, his face crazy with panic. He had a gun in one hand, the crowbar in the other, both objects held chest-high and ready; the picture of all that (made complete by that one-sided bedhead) made Dean snort a little, made him feel a burst of humor in spite of his exhaustion.
"What -" Sam sputtered. "What the hell, man."
"It's okay," Dean said. "I'm fine."
"Why didn't you answer me? I kept calling you. Is that thing soundproof? What the hell, man."
Dean moved on out into the hallway, and glanced up and down the hall.
"Dean," Sam fussed.
Smiling, though there was no longer any amusement behind it, Dean reached out and patted his brother on the chest.
He thought of Henry, tumbling out of the closet just a few weeks back. Of gaining the key to this place - of feeling worthy of it, because of what he and Sam had been through for the past thirty years, and yet wholly unworthy, because it was nothing Dad had introduced them to, nothing they'd come by naturally.
Of Jodie Foster whimpering, "Good to go! Good to go!"
Of Kevin and those damn tablets and what might still lie ahead of them, of what really wasn't likely to go well, because nothing every really did.
Of Cas, and a prayer.
"It's all good, Sammy," he said quietly. "You can unknot your shorts. I'm good."
"But -" Sam huffed. "What is that thing? Down here? What the hell is that thing? The door slammed shut on you, Dean."
"They hung it crooked."
"They - the hell they did. It shut on you."
Dean glanced down at the floor, at the collection of junk he'd hauled in from the car, then up at his brother's face. All of 'em alive and well, he thought. Doing good. Even Frank, who'd… what? Faked his own death?
Cagey bastard.
"Come on," he said to Sam. "Ditch the weapons. I need a beer, and something to eat."
Sam pouted at him, as he'd done more times than - hell, numbers didn't go that high. Grabbing a fistful of Sam's shirt, Dean set off toward the stairs, hauling Sam along beside him like a stubborn, unruly dog.
"Holodeck," Dean said when they reached the foot of the steps.
"What?"
"Could come in handy."
"I - what?"
Dean turned to look back. The door was closed now, leaving nothing of the room visible but that brushed steel panel.
There was magic inside, he reminded himself, and magic had so many ways of going bad. It made sense to tuck the room away like that, make it mostly inaccessible.
Later on, they could see if Sam could open it.
Or maybe they'd just leave it alone.
"Come on," he said, beginning his climb up the stairs. "Get me a beer, and some lunch, and I'll tell you."
* * * * *
"I measured," Dean said.
CHARACTERS: Dean and Sam
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: Up through 8.16
LENGTH: 4800 words
BEST KEPT HIDDEN
By Carol Davis
"So? What do you think?"
Sam stretched out a hand and ran it along the edge of the metal plate, thumb tracing the groove between the plate and the rest of the wall. He frowned for a minute, let out a soft "Hmm," then went back to frowning.
"I measured," Dean said.
"And?"
Dean showed him the big yellow Stanley tape measure he'd brought in from the car. "I checked the width of the rooms on either side. There's a gap in between, right where this is." He rapped the plate with a knuckle. "Decent sized. Close to nine feet unaccounted for."
They'd walked past the plate any number of times. It stretched from the floor almost to the hallway's low ceiling; was four feet wide, give or take. Steel, Dean guessed, though it had an odd sheen to it, and a brushed texture that made it look decorative rather than functional - the reason he and Sam had paid it little attention during the month-and-change they'd been here. Only boredom (spiced with a little curiosity) had prompted him to investigate it further.
"No hinges," Sam pointed out.
"Could be on the inside."
"Then what's the point? A door you can't open? What does that accomplish?" Before Dean could answer, Sam asked, "Did you check the other side?"
"It backs up on the boiler room."
"And there's no door in there."
"No."
"It could just be - I don't know. A closet full of ductwork or something."
"And they put that" - Dean nodded at the plate - "in front of it?"
"They stuck a sink and a medicine cabinet in the middle of their war room, like ten steps away from the bathroom. Who knows why anybody does anything, man. Maybe they had a big chunk of steel left over from something, and somebody just stuck it there on a whim."
"So you don't care what's behind it."
Shrugging, Sam rapped on the plate. Rapped a second time, harder, then tested a different spot. The plate sounded thick, sturdy, solid.
Like it was meant to protect something, maybe.
The two of them stood there in silence for a while, staring at the plate.
As Dean could have predicted, Sam twitched first. "I should get back to work," he said. "Durand's diary really looks like it's got some stuff Kevin can use. I should try to get through this one entry, see what he's got to say about -"
"Go," Dean told him.
"You sure?"
"You're probably right. Maybe they stuck this thing on the wall because the pipes made too much noise or something, and they wanted to block the sound. You know how it is. Old ductwork - damn stuff rattles like crazy. It kept 'em awake, or messed with their concentration, or - whatever. Go. Do your geek thing."
"I can -"
"Sam. Go. Translate."
Brains versus brawn had nothing to do with it, Dean thought as his brother walked away; it was a question of whether puzzles were best solved sitting in a chair, leaning over an old book, or by moving around, examining, touching, testing. Thumping the thing with a variety of tools: his fist, a hammer (covered with the thumb of an old mitten, to avoid denting the steel, because, all right, it was pretty, in a way), then with a rubber mallet; then testing it with the temperature sensor, the EMF meter, half a dozen magnets of different sizes, and finally, listening to it with the stethoscope Dean had carted out of the hospital the last time he and Sam had pretended to be doctors.
Nothing said the plate was anything but decorative.
Still, there was that gap behind it.
There would have been little use for a secret passageway in a place whose entire existence was a secret, or for a safe room in a place warded against every kind of evil.
What there was a use for, it seemed to Dean, was a repository for seriously bad mojo.
Things that could whisper.
Things that could kill.
He'd found nothing like that down here, or anywhere else in the Letters' sanctuary. The weapons and talismans and charms displayed in the library were mostly benign, things with very little juice, if they had any at all. Sure, the Men of Letters might have steered clear of bringing anything dangerous down to their lair, might well have buried it elsewhere, but if this was the safest place in the world, the place most impervious to anyone or anything that'd have a use for some supernatural nukes… then it made sense to bring it here.
To lock it up, down here.
Somewhere.
He tried running the tip of a heavy screwdriver along the groove at the edge of the plate, but of course, the thing was far too heavy to be shifted by something as fragile as a screwdriver. When he toted in the crowbar from the car, Sam blinked at him and raised an eyebrow, but when Dean waved him off, he went willingly back to his book.
The crowbar didn't budge the thing, either.
"Dude," Sam said when Dean brought in the blowtorch, "promise me you're not gonna burn the place down."
"A little faith, huh?" Dean said.
"Blowtorch?" Sam said. "Really?"
Dean pointed to Durand's diary, and to Sam's notebook, lying beside it. "Translate. I know what I'm doing."
All the blowtorch did was scorch the metal.
And.
Well.
Leave kind of a deep, smelly, blackened rut in the wall alongside the big steel plate.
Bothered, Dean went around to the boiler room and explored the wall that backed up on whatever was behind the plate. Because there was something behind it, dammit. The boiler room didn't run deep enough to reach the plate itself; a little work with the tape measure, and some notes scrawled on a scrap of paper, determined that there was a good eight feet of unaccounted-for space in there - a good eight feet square of unaccounted-for space.
Dean had broken a good-sized hole in the plaster of the boiler room wall and had raised his sledgehammer for another blow when Sam appeared in the doorway, Durand's diary in hand, all the hair on the left side of his head pushed crazy (bedhead in the middle of the day) from the way he'd been resting his head on his non-writing hand.
"You gonna fix that, if there's nothing in there?" Sam asked mildly.
"I could - yeah. I guess so."
"You need a hobby, man."
Chuckling under his breath, and shaking his messed-up head, Sam turned and walked away. Dean watched him go, sledgehammer dangling from his hand.
You need a hobby.
Sure.
Because there was nothing at all useful in finding out that there was a wall behind the wall. A gap of a little less than six inches (full of wiring and some plumbing, and the 2x4 framing), then another damned wall - and that second one was steel, not plaster.
There was an eight-foot steel cube in there, for no good reason.
Or maybe, the best reason in the world.
He considered, briefly, calling Sam back and showing him what was in there, but the two of them working at it - nah.
They'd agreed three weeks ago, mostly informally, that Sam's job was to go through all the books, to catalog them, flip through the ones that seemed most useful, then to begin translating anything that wasn't in English. Dean's job - mostly because it didn't involve sitting at a damn table all day long - was to organize the other stuff: the weapons, the charms, the talismans, the potions and herbs and mystical ingredients. There wasn't a whole lot of that; clearly, the Men of Letters had felt it better to leave the collection and storage of the Magical Mystery stuff to the keepers of shops around the world, within easy reach of hunters who might need to cast a quick spell.
There was some, though, down here in the lair.
Stuff the Letters would need for their crazy ceremonies, maybe.
Things they didn't trust to anybody else.
So: find it. Open the door. Take a look. Make a list. Then, do the big "Tah Dah!" and unveil it for Sam.
Completely doable.
Sensible.
No need for the two of them to work on this, particularly when Durand's diary needed to be translated, and any useful information in it passed on to Kevin, so the poor kid could finish working on the damn tablet and get his life back.
Frowning, Dean put his hand through the gap in the wall and probed the expanse of steel he'd uncovered.
No way to break through it from out here, not without some serious firepower.
Leaving the sledgehammer on the floor of the boiler room, alongside an impressive heap of crumbled plaster, he made his way back to that fancy door-like thing and stood pondering it with his dusty hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans.
There was a chance, of course, that it wasn't a door at all, but simply the side of the cube; that the thing was solid, had been welded together, leaving no seams, no way to get inside - to get at what had been locked within it.
Then why include something that looked like a door?
He used the tip of the screwdriver to explore the groove around the edge of the plate: ran it slowly and gently all the way around, looking for evidence of hinges, or a keyhole. For anything at all, really. When he'd made a full circuit he tried it again.
Nothing.
"Need a friggin' missile," he muttered. "Low-level tactical nuke."
Or you could…
Nah.
Couldn't be that simple.
But with that bunch of elitist douchebags, and the secret ceremonies Henry had described - the ones involving red velvet robes and the chanting and "levels of knowledge"? A lot of it, Sam had pointed out, was similar to the goings-on of every other secret society people had cooked up over the centuries - a lot of foolishness and mumbo-jumbo.
Game-playing, that's what it was, and that didn't make it a whole lot different from what Charlie and her buddies had been doing out in that field, pretending they were on "Moondor."
Dean glanced over his shoulder, toward the stairs leading up to the library, where Sam was undoubtedly still bent over his old book, scribbling notes, frowning at phrases that were a little troublesome. He wouldn't want to be called away from what he was doing, not when the ultimate goal, here, was closing the gates of Hell. This wasn't Sammy working on some book report, or a paper on the shifts in European merchant society during the Crusades.
This was big stuff. Important stuff.
Dean took his hands out of his pockets. Nothing was likely to come busting out of there, but it was best to be prepared to fight.
Right?
Those snooty asshats wouldn't have locked anything alive in there.
He drew in a deep breath.
Better not to have Sam here; if this didn't work - and what Dean figured on doing was so lame and stupid, of course it wouldn't work - it was better not to have Sam standing there, making that face. That You made me get up from what I was doing, for THIS? face. True, Sam had been a whole shit-ton more agreeable and mellow down here than he'd been since… well, practically ever, but still. He was up there doing important stuff.
"Open," Dean said to the door.
He fully expected nothing to happen, because good God, this was lame.
But with the creak of long-unused hinges, the door began to swing inward.
For a moment, Dean didn't breathe. He'd been fully astonished by a good many things in his life, enough of them that the impact might well have been dulled, might have justifiably seemed like same old, same old.
But this?
There was nothing alive inside that small steel cube.
There was nothing in it at all.
Which meant… what? That there'd been something in there at one time, but the Letters had taken it out? Or that they'd built this room to contain something that hadn't arrived here before they were all killed? Puzzled, Dean reached out to rest a hand on the door and pushed it all the way open, as far as its concealed hinges would allow. There was no light fixture inside, no source of illumination, but enough light spilled in from the hallway that he could reassure himself that yes, the room was completely empty.
Not, however, undecorated.
All six surfaces inside - the four walls, the ceiling, and the floor - were liberally covered with runes and symbols, some of which Dean recognized and some he didn't. Some of them had been laid out in straight lines, others in spirals. They reminded Dean very much of the interior of that old barn he and Bobby had decorated to summon the being who turned out to be Cas, but this involved a lot of different symbols. Wrong symbols.
"Sam," Dean said.
Then, louder: "SAM!"
It was all a matter of vocal cues, he thought, because instead of calling back, "WHAT?" or ignoring him entirely, Sam came hustling down the stairs, bringing himself up short when he realized the door was open.
"How -?" he began, then abandoned the question in favor of peering in at the runes.
"Gonna need your help with this," Dean said. "I'm going in there. Need you to stand here and keep that door from slamming shut on me. Not really feeling like being trapped right now, you know?"
"Then don't -"
Shaking his head, Dean grabbed a flashlight from the pile of tools he'd brought in from the car and switched it on. He gave in to the urge to flick the beam at Sam's eyes, grinning at the predictable bitchface the tease created, then turned to direct the light inside the small, apparently unused room. This time he was prepared for something to happen, but nothing did.
"Be careful," Sam told him.
"Called you down here, didn't I?"
Unease fluttered through him as he walked past the threshold. As he'd calculated, the room was about eight feet square, so even standing at the far wall put him only a couple of steps from the door - but a lifetime of awkward (and often painful) experiences told him that getting out often wasn't as easy as it seemed, and he tossed a nod of gratitude to Sam for being there, whether or not this room proved to be nothing more than unused storage.
He was still smiling at his brother when the door flew shut.
"DEAN!" Sam bellowed from outside. "DEAN!"
His voice was muffled, as was the sound of his fists hammering against the steel.
"I'm okay!" Dean yelled back, a little annoyed at himself - and Sam - for not blocking the doorway with something the flying steel panel couldn't shove out of the way. "Just… hang on. I'm okay."
There was, after all, that open sesame trick.
And he would have tried it, would have bailed out of this situation (assuming the door would actually open a second time) if the runes hadn't started to glow. All at once, as if their power source had been flipped on, they turned from black to brilliant white to a warm gold, and seemed to grow out of the walls and ceiling and floor, becoming three-dimensional, seeming to float in the air several inches from the flat surfaces on which they'd been painted.
"DEAN?!?"
"HOLD ON," Dean shouted. "Just… cool your jets."
He was tempted to be nervous - hell, was tempted to indulge himself and be at least a little scared out of his wits - but the sense of wonder that had overcome him when the door opened reestablished itself, and he stood gaping at the glowing symbols like a child trying to make sense of a star-filled Montana sky. They seemed to grow as he stood there, overlapping each other, in a way that made him feel that his vision wasn't keen enough, that his mind might not be keen enough, to absorb enough of this to allow him to take part in… whatever this was.
That movie, his head told him.
Remember? That movie. With Jodie Foster. Where she goes in the thing and they drop it and she goes all apeshit and keeps saying, "Good to go! Good to go!" and she ends up in that other place that's all funky and her dad's there.
Like that.
Almost as if he had compelled them to do so, the runes continued to morph, taking on color and shape, blending from separate objects into a landscape, a continuous spread of light and dimension and texture.
He was inside an eight-foot steel cube, a good twenty feet below ground level.
He told himself that, firmly.
Ignoring everything his senses told him: sight, sound, smell.
Outside.
For a minute, his mind went on jabbering at him about Jodie Foster and aliens and secret codes, about weirdly-colored beaches and wormholes and dead fathers and multi-billion-dollar spaceship-type things.
Then it latched onto something else, and a grin spread across his face like water bubbling up out of the ground.
Holodeck.
Fuck me running, it's a damn holodeck!
"SAMMY!" he bellowed at the door. "Holy shit, man! You're not gonna believe this! Wait'll you see this, man!"
Sam didn't answer.
Didn't yell or pound on the door.
That worried Dean for a moment, but the easy answer was, Sam had run off to get something he could use to batter the door open. He'd figured the crowbar and the blowtorch and the other crap Dean had piled up out in the hall would be of no use, so he'd run up to the car to get something else - though what that might be, Dean couldn't imagine.
Really, it was difficult to care.
Heart fluttering inside his chest, he began to test the limits of the place - of this illusion, because that was certainly what it was. The rune-covered steel floor was only eight feet across, only two or three steps, but Dean began to walk at a tentative pace, then more normally, and the room let him keep going. He walked across a wide expanse of gently rolling, grassy earth, aware of its give and take beneath the soles of his boots, aware too of the scent of the grass, of the fresh, pungent smells of early spring, of the brush of a cool breeze against his face.
Somehow, at a time when there'd been very little in the way of modern technology (at least, as Dean thought of that term from a 2013 perspective), those crazy elitist sons of bitches had managed to create something that would turn up on a TV show as futuristic make-believe some thirty or forty years later.
But not by using technology, he reminded himself.
Using magic.
The thought made him stop walking; made him freeze where he was and look around.
He couldn't still be inside that room, magic or not. What lay around him was far too detailed, far too real.
He was coming to the edge of a city park, he realized, one that lay in the middle of a cluster of good-sized buildings, some of them ten or twelve stories high, some labeled as banks or hotels, others anonymous. Ordinary midday traffic filled the streets - cars, buses, cabs, a truck or two - and pedestrians made their way along the sidewalk, most of them in business attire, a few in more casual clothing.
One of them was Frank Devereaux.
Startled, Dean began moving again, shifting his pace into a trot so he could keep up with the man he and Sam had assumed was years dead. Devereaux wore the look of constipated distress that had been his most normal expression, but otherwise - and oddly - he seemed at ease. Comfortable with his surroundings, as if he'd been there for a good long while. "Frank?" Dean called out to him. "Yo! Hey! Frank!"
It wasn't surprising that Frank ignored him; calling out was probably unwise, especially if the man had assumed another identity, had gone into his own self-generated WITSEC.
What was surprising was that everyone else ignored Dean, too.
No one frowned.
No one looked for the source of his cries.
No one stepped aside to let him pass.
In fact, a man engrossed in typing a text on his cell phone walked right through him.
That brought Dean up short once again; prompted him to duck out of the flight path of the pedestrians, into a nook created by the indented wall of one of the buildings. From there, he could observe.
Could reach out to touch a polished granite wall that let his hand pass right on through.
So: not real, then.
He was still inside the steel room; it hadn't transported him somewhere else, someplace hundreds - maybe thousands - of miles from Lebanon, Kansas. Feeling somewhat let down, but at the same time intrigued, he moved out of the nook and hurried down the sidewalk in the direction Devereaux had taken, skirting quickly around everyone who stepped into his path. Frank couldn't have gone far, not in the few seconds that had elapsed - but he was gone. Nowhere to be seen.
Once again, Dean stopped moving.
He'd taken a breath or two, wondering if he should try to figure out which building Frank had entered, when the scenery around him began to change.
Morphed into another town, this one less cosmopolitan, more tourist-oriented. The buildings were smaller, only a few stories at best, and seemed to be mostly souvenir shops, small restaurants, bookshops, snack stands. The people moving in and out of the structures were dressed in lightweight, casual clothes, some of them in shorts and t-shirts, and they were toting cameras and beach gear, ice cream cones and soft drinks in paper cups instead of briefcases.
Among them was a teenage boy who looked familiar.
Jesse?
Older, yes, but then, several years had gone by since Dean had last seen the boy Cas had identified as being the Antichrist.
He looked content, but pensive.
Dean didn't bother trying to say anything to him.
Instead, he closed his eyes for a moment. Took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes, the room showed him Kevin, hard at work below decks on Garth's wreck of a houseboat, head bent low over his notebook, the hand holding his pencil tapping gently against the tabletop in time to music Dean couldn't hear.
Then the room showed him Jody Mills, behind the wheel of her sheriff's department cruiser, her left arm propped in the open driver's window, singing tunelessly along with whatever was playing on the radio as her car sailed on past Dean, who was standing at the side of the road.
It showed him Deacon, herding inmates off a bus at Green River Detention Center.
Showed him Charlie Bradbury, grinning broadly as she hammered away at the keyboard of a laptop.
Showed him Krissy Chambers and her dad, Diana Ballard, Kathleen Hudak, Barnes and Damien, Ed Zeddmore and Harry Spangler, Bobby's widowed friend Tamara, Haley Collins and Garth and Don Stark. Jamie the barmaid.
Showed him a dozen others, all alive and well.
It showed him Lisa and Ben.
Ben grown taller now, more slender, Lisa with a different hairstyle, the two of them bundled in warm jackets as they climbed into a car Dean didn't recognize. Nor did he recognize the house they'd walked out of, or the neighborhood. They'd moved again, then - maybe back near Lisa's sister. Were puzzled, maybe, over why they'd moved away in the first place. Puzzled over a lot of things.
With any luck, they didn't worry about it too much.
Couldn't, if Cas had done his job well.
Cas…?
Everyone alive and well - and Cas nowhere to be seen. "Where are you, man?" Dean murmured. "What's going on with you?"
All of them alive and well.
He stood and watched as Lisa and Ben drove away - off to a movie, maybe, or Lisa's sister's house, or a friend's. Shopping. To some community event, or a party. Some everyday thing.
Then he closed his eyes again.
Phone hooooome, he thought, his mind full of the little extraterrestrial's voice. A roomful of runes, buried deep underground, apparently constructed so that the men (and women?) who'd been in residence here could keep tabs on their loved ones without using the phone, without giving away their location to anyone anxious to trace them here. A way to be home, more or less, for people weary of being buried away from sunlight and fresh air.
"DEAN!" Sam roared from outside, his voice barely audible through the thick steel walls.
Dean let a minute go by, rubbing at his eyes with the flats of his fingers. He was nauseated, a little, by all of those rapidly-changing images - by being thrust from town to town, state to state, without actually going anywhere. There'd been a 360-degree "sensurround" experience at Disneyland, he remembered from a visit there with Dad and Sam, what seemed like a century ago: a rapid-fire tour across America, a full continent in three or four minutes, and this was something like that, on steroids. Or, maybe, the disorientation was partly due to the lack of air in here, to the claustrophobia of being locked underground.
Of being not There, but Here.
Not with any of those people, but separate. Invisible. As intangible as a ghost.
When Dean opened his eyes, the runes were once again nothing more than simple black symbols painted onto a plain steel surface; the room was lit only by the beam of the flashlight that had tumbled out of his hand onto the floor.
Suddenly weary, he took a step toward the door and told it softly, "Open."
Sam all but leaped at him as the door swung open, his face crazy with panic. He had a gun in one hand, the crowbar in the other, both objects held chest-high and ready; the picture of all that (made complete by that one-sided bedhead) made Dean snort a little, made him feel a burst of humor in spite of his exhaustion.
"What -" Sam sputtered. "What the hell, man."
"It's okay," Dean said. "I'm fine."
"Why didn't you answer me? I kept calling you. Is that thing soundproof? What the hell, man."
Dean moved on out into the hallway, and glanced up and down the hall.
"Dean," Sam fussed.
Smiling, though there was no longer any amusement behind it, Dean reached out and patted his brother on the chest.
He thought of Henry, tumbling out of the closet just a few weeks back. Of gaining the key to this place - of feeling worthy of it, because of what he and Sam had been through for the past thirty years, and yet wholly unworthy, because it was nothing Dad had introduced them to, nothing they'd come by naturally.
Of Jodie Foster whimpering, "Good to go! Good to go!"
Of Kevin and those damn tablets and what might still lie ahead of them, of what really wasn't likely to go well, because nothing every really did.
Of Cas, and a prayer.
"It's all good, Sammy," he said quietly. "You can unknot your shorts. I'm good."
"But -" Sam huffed. "What is that thing? Down here? What the hell is that thing? The door slammed shut on you, Dean."
"They hung it crooked."
"They - the hell they did. It shut on you."
Dean glanced down at the floor, at the collection of junk he'd hauled in from the car, then up at his brother's face. All of 'em alive and well, he thought. Doing good. Even Frank, who'd… what? Faked his own death?
Cagey bastard.
"Come on," he said to Sam. "Ditch the weapons. I need a beer, and something to eat."
Sam pouted at him, as he'd done more times than - hell, numbers didn't go that high. Grabbing a fistful of Sam's shirt, Dean set off toward the stairs, hauling Sam along beside him like a stubborn, unruly dog.
"Holodeck," Dean said when they reached the foot of the steps.
"What?"
"Could come in handy."
"I - what?"
Dean turned to look back. The door was closed now, leaving nothing of the room visible but that brushed steel panel.
There was magic inside, he reminded himself, and magic had so many ways of going bad. It made sense to tuck the room away like that, make it mostly inaccessible.
Later on, they could see if Sam could open it.
Or maybe they'd just leave it alone.
"Come on," he said, beginning his climb up the stairs. "Get me a beer, and some lunch, and I'll tell you."
* * * * *