SPN fic: "Hickory Hill" 3/8+epilogue
Headers in Chapter 1.
Chapter 1| Chapter 2
Chapter 3
It was kind of nice, Sam thought, to not have to sneak or con their way into a haunted house for once in their lives. To just pull up into the driveway and walk up to the front door with keys in hand as if they owned the place, though even in his wildest dreams of lawyerly success, Sam had trouble envisioning himself ever owning a place like that. The house was large and imposing, with two high stories and an attic under a broad gabled roof. Two rows of white columns supported upper and lower verandas across the front and dozens of windows gleamed in the afternoon sun.
"Nice, huh?" Dean slouched against a column while Sam sorted through Walter's keys to find the one that would open the front door. He eyed the broad expanse of the veranda with an expression of vague distaste. "Old man Crenshaw must've made a mint."
"Yeah." Sam finally fit the right key into the lock and cautiously nudged the door open a few inches. When nothing jumped out and tried to eat his head, he pushed it open all the way. "I read once that big windows were a sign of wealth in old houses like this, because large panes of glass were expensive. Crenshaw was showing off."
"Dude, you had way too much time on your hands at Stanford." Dean brushed past Sam and into the foyer. "Come on, the stairs to the attic are this way."
The two main floors were bright and airy, daylight flooding the rooms through the expensive windows. Every surface was spotless, and the air smelled of potpourri and wood polish. In contrast, the attic was oppressively dark and stuffy. The only windows were at opposite ends of the long corridor that ran from the front to the back of the house, and they were too small and grimy to let much light in. Sam turned on his flashlight and held it at eye level, watching dust motes dance in the beam.
"Is this place wired for electricity?" he asked.
"Not up here." Dean dug the EMF meter from his backpack and switched it on. It emitted a couple of sullen beeps and fell silent. "Back when this place was a museum, they used to hang oil lanterns from the beams. For atmosphere."
"Atmosphere. Right." Sam swept the flashlight from side to side, picking out cobwebs, rotting woodwork, the occasional beetle scurrying into the shadows. "That's just what this place needs. You getting anything?"
"Nothing." Dean smacked the meter against his hand a couple of times, but it didn't so much as beep. "The geist has always been nocturnal, though. Maybe the new visitors are too."
"Well, we have an hour of daylight left." Sam brushed a cobweb out of his way and inched forward. That should give us plenty of time to scout around."
There wasn't much to scout. The place clearly hadn't been used for years, not even to store the sort of random junk people normally piled in their attics. The central corridor was bare, lined with heavy wooden doors on either side. Each door had a tiny barred window, and a few still retained the rusty iron brackets with open padlocks dangling from them. Everything was coated with a thick, fluffy layer of dust, and a jumble of footprints marked where Stacey and her friends had passed two days before.
Each door opened onto a windowless cell about the size of a horse stall. Iron shackles hung from rings on the walls. When Sam aimed the flashlight beam toward the floor, he could see the marks in the wood where more rings had once been attached. The air inside the cells was stale, thick with the musty smells of rotting wood and rodent droppings. Just looking in from the relatively open space of the corridor made Sam's throat and chest tighten with claustrophobia.
"You know," Dean grumbled from behind him, "if I died in this shithole and a bunch of teenyboppers with a painted piece of cardboard summoned me back, I'd wanna break somebody's arm too."
Sam couldn't argue with that. "Speaking of painted cardboard, where the hell is it?"
They found the Ouija board on the floor under the back window. It was, as Dean had said, just a painted piece of cardboard, midnight blue, with a border of astrological symbols embossed in silver. The letters were also silver, in a fancy gothic font, and the i was dotted with a star. The planchette was a translucent triangle of pale aquamarine plastic in a pewter frame decorated with more stars on the corners.
"Hippie new-age woo-woo crap," Dean muttered. He kneeled to run the EMF meter over the board. "Nothing special about this thing. I bet any other board would've worked the same in this house."
"Which means destroying it probably won't help," Sam sighed. "Great. Why can't anything ever be simple?"
"Because then it wouldn't be any fun." Dean grinned and stood up, dusting off the knees of his jeans. "So, any bright ideas?"
"Just the usual," Sam told him. "Wait until dark, then use the board ourselves to summon whatever it was that the girls summoned, and send it back." Sam had never seen it done himself, but Dad, Caleb and Bobby all swore by it.
Dean looked as if he was about to agree, but then his face suddenly went hard, and he jutted his chin forward stubbornly.
"No."
"Huh? What are you talking about Dean? You know as well as I do this is how it's done. Anything summoned by an Ouija board needs to be sent back by the same board. That's how these things work."
"Yeah, well, that's not how we're gonna do it." The mulish look on Dean's face didn't falter. "We'll think of something else."
"Why?"
"Because."
"Because why?"
Dean stared at the wall behind Sam's shoulder with an expression that said he was prepared to keep staring until the next millennium. Sam resisted the urge to grab and shake him.
"Dean..."
"I don't want you messing with the board, okay?" Dean blurted out. "It's not safe."
"Not safe," Sam repeated blankly. "Right. As opposed to... the sweet fluffy-bunny things we normally mess with?"
"Screw you." Dean rolled his eyes. "You know what I mean. Ouija boards are especially dangerous for people who are... sensitive."
"Sensi--" Sam blinked in confusion for a moment, wondering if this was going to be another one of those "oh, you're such a touchy-feely girl" routines Dean found so hilarious. Then comprehension dawned. "You mean psychic.." He glared accusingly at his brother, who shrugged a little and scuffed one foot in the dust. "You said it didn't freak you out."
"It doesn't," Dean said quickly. "But that doesn't mean I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist. That big college-boy brain of yours is receiving all sorts of freaky shit from who-knows-where these days, and doing a seance strikes me as a really, really bad idea. So we think of something else."
"Okay." Sam slouched against the wall next to the window and folded his arms across his chest. "Go ahead. Think of something else."
"I will." Dean scratched the back of his neck. "Give me a minute."
Sam let about thirty seconds crawl by before tapping one foot on the floor. "I'm waiting."
"Dude." Dean scowled at him. "I can't think with you staring at me."
"This is bullshit, Dean. You know what we have to do, and you don't want to do it because of me. Is that how it's going to be from now on? Am I a liability now?"
This was exactly what he'd been afraid of when he'd first told Dean about the nightmares, about the visions, about moving the cabinet. Well, no, that wasn't exactly true. There were a million other things he'd feared more. But the idea that Dean was going to adjust for him now, as if he had a handicap that needed accommodating, made him want to yell and kick the walls. He must've looked it, too, because Dean quickly held his hands out in a placating gesture.
"Come on, Sam, you know it's not like that. Any of the usual shit, it wouldn't make a difference. But these things--" He poked the board with the toe of his boot as if it was something long dead and poorly preserved. "Either they don't work at all or they're really bad news, there's never any middle. We don't know what those girls called up -- could be ghosts, could be another, stronger poltergeist, could be a minor demon for all we know. I just don't think we should be opening up a direct hotline into your head without knowing what might take advantage, that's all."
All right, so maybe that wasn't an entirely unreasonable objection. Sam wasn't totally sure he believed it, but it wasn't unreasonable. He took a steadying breath and got a grip on his rising temper with only minimal effort.
"Look, we can take precautions, okay? I won't touch the board -- you can run it, and I'll ask the questions. Anything goes wrong, you can close the board and end it. Totally your call." Ouija boards worked better with two people handling the planchette, but one would do in a pinch. And Sam knew his brother well enough to know that Dean would be more willing to go along if he thought he was in full control of the situation. "We can cast a circle of protection, too. Anything we summon will be stuck outside it."
"That might work..." Dean said dubiously.
Sam hurried to press the advantage. "It's the only thing we know will work, Dean. Come on. We've got just enough time to get our stuff from the car and make the circle."
"Fine," Dean muttered sulkily. "Don't come running to me when you start barfing pea soup and spinning your head around."
* * * * *
They poured the salt in a thick stream on the floor right around the board, using it to trace a pentagram within a circle. Sam read a blessing in Latin while Dean set down two pairs of shotguns where they would be easy to reach without disturbing the salt. It was way more precaution than they usually went through for a simple haunting, but Sam could see that Dean still wasn't entirely satisfied. He didn't say anything, but the wary looks he kept shooting in Sam's direction spoke volumes. Telling him to stop worrying would be pointless, so Sam just pretended not to notice.
As the sun went down, he attic went from gloomy to pitch-black. The air grew steadily colder -- far colder than it had any business being, indoors at this time of year. The beam of Sam's flashlight dimmed and flickered for a minute, then went out altogether, and the two spares Dean dug from his duffel did no better.
"Damn," Dean said cheerfully into the darkness, "can't work the board if I can't see it. Guess we'd better think of something else."
"I have candles in my backpack," Sam said. Dean growled something indistinct under his breath. For a moment Sam thought they were going to argue again, but the growling subsided into a resigned huff of breath, and a few seconds later Dean flicked on his lighter so that Sam could see.
He put a votive candle at each point of the pentagram, and Dean bent down to light them, wrinkling his nose as he did so.
"Dude, are these flower scented?"
"They were on sale," Sam said defensively.
Dean smirked at him as he tucked the lighter back into his pocket. "Admit it, Sammy, you just have a thing for gardenias."
Sam snorted, and Dean's expression instantly turned defensive.
"What?"
"You could tell that was gardenia scent? I had to check the labels to find out."
"Yeah, well..." Dean looked flustered for a moment, but recovered quickly. "There was this chick in a flower shop in Savannah--"
"Whatever." Sam quickly held up a hand to forestall yet another tale of Dean's sexual exploits. "Can we get on with this, please?"
"Yeah, fine, getting on." Dean sat down Indian-style on the floor, careful not to disturb the salt lines, and pulled the board over to lie in front of him. He rested his fingers lightly on top of the planchette. "Ready?"
Sam sat down on the other side of the board facing Dean. "Ready." A gust of icy wind rattled the window pane behind him as he spoke. It ruffled Sam's hair and made the shadows dance in the flickering candle flames, but didn't shift a single grain of salt out of place. "Looks like something else's ready, too." He took a notepad and pencil from his backpack and set the pad in his lap.
"Here we go, then." Dean slid the planchette toward the top left corner of the board, where the silver letters spelled out "Hello." He let it rest there as he closed his eyes and relaxed his hands.
Another gust swept down the hallway with a banshee-like howl. The cell doors flapped madly on their hinges, flying open and slamming shut over and over with wood-splintering force. Sam could hear the chains rattling against the walls, the roof beams groaning overhead. He shivered, pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head, and tightened his grip on the notepad.
"Hello," he called out, "is anyone there?" Stupid question, really, but it was the traditional way to start off, and as good a way as any of finding out if it -- whatever it might be -- was in a mood to respond with something besides door-slamming theatrics.
Dean's hands wobbled in place for a moment before guiding the planchette down toward the "Yes" in the lower left corner. The plastic triangle framed the word exactly, though Dean's eyes remained tightly closed. Sam poised his pencil over the notepad and leaned forward a little to get a better view of the board.
"Who are you?"
The wind that had still been stirring up the dust outside their circle died down abruptly. For a few seconds, everything went still. Then the howling started again, and the planchette began to zigzag over the board in random patterns, sliding from one letter to another so rapidly that it threatened to fly right out from under Dean's fingers. Sam tried to follow the sequence, to see what it was spelling out, but it was moving too fast for him to even read the letters, let alone write anything down.
Then the board itself started moving, inching across the floor with a wobbly, side-to-side motion as if trying to get a way from Dean. One corner of it came perilously close to a salt line, and Sam reached down with one hand to pin it in place.
As soon as his fingers touched the board, the world changed. It was like falling through a funhouse mirror into a distorted reflection. The attic was still there, but everything else was different. Pale sunlight gleamed through the window. The salt and the candles were gone. The Ouija board was gone. More to the point, Dean was gone, and that realization sent Sam scrambling to his feet, shouting his brother's name.
There was no answer. He could hear voices all around, but none of them sounded like Dean's. Some of the voices were sobbing. Others seemed to be moaning in fear or pain. In the distance, way down at the other end of the corridor, someone was singing, though the sound was too faint for Sam to pick out anything more than the faintest hint of a mournful melody.
Sam glanced around, searching for the source of the sounds, and realized for the first time that all the cell doors were not only shut but barred. They looked different, too -- newer, the wood less weathered, the iron fittings unmarked by rust. At the same time, everything looked kind of fuzzy, blurred around the edges, as if he was viewing a slightly out-of-focus projection of his surroundings instead of the real thing. Sam might've thought he was dreaming, except for the faint scent of gardenia candles still tickling his nose every time he breathed in.
"Dean!" he shouted again. No answer. He hadn't really expected one. Sam was starting to suspect that Dean wasn't the one who'd gone away.
He took a tentative step forward. His booted feet made no sound against the floor. In fact, he wasn't sure he was touching the floor at all. There was no pressure on the soles of his feet, no sensation of bearing his own weight. Walking suddenly became an awkward, unfamiliar activity. His center of gravity was gone -- not just shifted, but gone. Sam felt as if he had to hold every muscle in his body tense and rigid just to remain upright. He took two more steps, short and jerky, and laid one hand against the nearest door. Or rather, tried to lay a hand against it; his fingers passed through the wood as through a thick fog.
On the other side of the door, somebody yelped. Sam started to call out, then stopped himself. He eyed the door warily for a few seconds, took a deep breath to steady himself, and walked right through the wood into the cell on the other side.
There was a girl there, crouched on a frayed blanket in the corner furthest from the door. The light from the corridor was too dim to illuminate the cell, and for a moment all Sam could make out was her silhouette, huddled and shaking against the wall. Then his eyes adjusted, and he couldn't suppress a startled hiss.
There was blood everywhere: soaking the front of the girl's once-white shift from waist to hem, staining her hands and face, turning most of the blanket the color of ancient rust. Sam was suddenly deeply grateful that he couldn't smell his surroundings. Just seeing the gore was enough to turn his stomach. He swallowed hard, wincing at the sour burn of bile in his throat, and took a cautious step forward.
Not cautious enough apparently -- the girl immediately tried to scurry away from him, even though there was no place for her to go. Her bare feet scrabbled on the floor as she pressed her back harder and harder against the wall, and her breath came in harsh wheezing gasps. The skirt of her shift rode up a little from her movements, and Sam saw that her left ankle was shackled, attached to the floor by a couple of feet of thick iron chain.
Sam stepped back, feeling sick, and held his empty hands out in front of him.
"It's all right," he said, pitching his voice soft and low, and tried to look as harmless and unthreatening as a man his size possibly could. "I won't hurt you."
She stilled, but did not relax. Sam could see her eyes now, opened so wide that a ring of white was visible around each iris. She was small and bony, with dark skin and a tangle of wiry, sweat-dampened black hair. The fear that distorted her face made it hard to judge her age, but Sam thought she was young, probably closer to Stacey's age than to his own. He gave her his best reassuring smile as he slowly lowered himself to the floor, keeping his hands in sight the whole time. Even sitting with his back bowed and his shoulders hunched he was still gigantic compared to her, but at least he wasn't looming quite so much.
"I won't hurt you," he repeated. "Please don't be afraid." It was, he suspected, a very stupid thing to say, but Sam was damned if he could think of any non-stupid things to say under the circumstances. Then again, past experience had taught him that when a person got this scared, what you said to them didn't matter. It was tone and body language that got the message across. So he kept slouching, kept saying "it's all right" and "don't be afraid" over and over again until she stopped trying to push herself through the wall and looked at him with eyes that were wary but not terrified.
"You the devil?" she demanded abruptly.
"Uhm... no." Sam couldn't quite hold back an awkward laugh, though it was clear enough that she wasn't joking. "My name is Sam. I... I'd like to help you, if I can."
She gave a short, bitter laugh and pushed her hair back from her face with a shaking hand.
"You can't help me," she said in a harsh voice, "I'm dead."
"Right... you noticed. That's... good." Sam shifted awkwardly in his seat and heroically resisted the impulse to pull at his hair. This was one of the more bizarre conversations he'd ever had and given his life, that was really saying something. "Look, the thing is, you're not supposed to be here, okay? And I can help you go to-- to wherever you're supposed to be. I think."
She stared at him in silence for a long time before turning away to examine the cell around them. "Is this hell, then?" she asked. "I had wondered. I didn't think I'd been so very wicked."
"This isn't hell." Sam shook his head. "Listen, uhm... do you have a name?"
"Olivia."
"Okay. Olivia. Do you... do you recognize this place? This cell, this house?"
"Yes." She shivered and gave a quick, jerky nod.
"Do you remember what happened to you? How you died?"
"I had a baby..." Olivia ran one hand down the front of her stained shift and looked down at the smear of blood on her palm. Her eyes suddenly went wide and unfocused. Sam wondered if it was possible for a ghost to faint. "Where did--" She glanced around wildly. "Did it die with me? Is it here?" Her breath hitched, and the air in the cell seemed to vibrate. Sam felt a crackle of energy sparking along his skin, raising goosebumps on his arms and the back of his neck. Olivia pushed away from the wall and lurched toward him, landing awkwardly on her knees as the chain on her ankle pulled taut. "Please, sir, it can't be here! Surely the Lord wouldn't send a tiny baby to hell just for being mine, would He? Please--"
She reached out to grip Sam's shoulder, but her fingers passed right through with no resistance. Sam had expected the not-touch to feel cold, the way ghosts normally did, but all he felt was a faint tingling, as if his arm was falling asleep. Olivia jerked her hand back with a gasp, and Sam realized that he was the intangible spirit here, not her.
The vibration in the air grew more intense. Sam felt as if he was trapped inside a giant bell that someone was striking over and over again. He couldn't hear the ringing, but he could feel each strike right down to his bones. Then the howling came again, similar to what he'd heard when Dean first touched the Ouija board, but louder, and now Sam could tell that it wasn't one voice but many. One of them sounded like a baby crying. Beside him, Olivia curled in on herself and flung her arms over her head. Sam knew he couldn't touch her, couldn't help or comfort, but he found himself reaching out anyway. His arm felt strangely heavy -- he hadn't even noticed how weightless he'd been in this place until the weightlessness disappeared -- and he froze when he saw his own hand flickering in front of his face, like an old film skipping frames.
The world around him blurred into fog. The howling cut off into silence. The heaviness in Sam's arm spread to the rest of his body, and he felt himself being pulled down, as if sinking into icy water. A band of pressure squeezed his chest, stopping his breath for a moment, then abruptly released. Sam jerked, sucked in a lungful of air, and found himself staring up into Dean's wide-eyed face.
"Sam! Sammy! You still with me, man?"
"No," Sam said thickly, and blacked out.
Chapter 4
Chapter 1| Chapter 2
Chapter 3
It was kind of nice, Sam thought, to not have to sneak or con their way into a haunted house for once in their lives. To just pull up into the driveway and walk up to the front door with keys in hand as if they owned the place, though even in his wildest dreams of lawyerly success, Sam had trouble envisioning himself ever owning a place like that. The house was large and imposing, with two high stories and an attic under a broad gabled roof. Two rows of white columns supported upper and lower verandas across the front and dozens of windows gleamed in the afternoon sun.
"Nice, huh?" Dean slouched against a column while Sam sorted through Walter's keys to find the one that would open the front door. He eyed the broad expanse of the veranda with an expression of vague distaste. "Old man Crenshaw must've made a mint."
"Yeah." Sam finally fit the right key into the lock and cautiously nudged the door open a few inches. When nothing jumped out and tried to eat his head, he pushed it open all the way. "I read once that big windows were a sign of wealth in old houses like this, because large panes of glass were expensive. Crenshaw was showing off."
"Dude, you had way too much time on your hands at Stanford." Dean brushed past Sam and into the foyer. "Come on, the stairs to the attic are this way."
The two main floors were bright and airy, daylight flooding the rooms through the expensive windows. Every surface was spotless, and the air smelled of potpourri and wood polish. In contrast, the attic was oppressively dark and stuffy. The only windows were at opposite ends of the long corridor that ran from the front to the back of the house, and they were too small and grimy to let much light in. Sam turned on his flashlight and held it at eye level, watching dust motes dance in the beam.
"Is this place wired for electricity?" he asked.
"Not up here." Dean dug the EMF meter from his backpack and switched it on. It emitted a couple of sullen beeps and fell silent. "Back when this place was a museum, they used to hang oil lanterns from the beams. For atmosphere."
"Atmosphere. Right." Sam swept the flashlight from side to side, picking out cobwebs, rotting woodwork, the occasional beetle scurrying into the shadows. "That's just what this place needs. You getting anything?"
"Nothing." Dean smacked the meter against his hand a couple of times, but it didn't so much as beep. "The geist has always been nocturnal, though. Maybe the new visitors are too."
"Well, we have an hour of daylight left." Sam brushed a cobweb out of his way and inched forward. That should give us plenty of time to scout around."
There wasn't much to scout. The place clearly hadn't been used for years, not even to store the sort of random junk people normally piled in their attics. The central corridor was bare, lined with heavy wooden doors on either side. Each door had a tiny barred window, and a few still retained the rusty iron brackets with open padlocks dangling from them. Everything was coated with a thick, fluffy layer of dust, and a jumble of footprints marked where Stacey and her friends had passed two days before.
Each door opened onto a windowless cell about the size of a horse stall. Iron shackles hung from rings on the walls. When Sam aimed the flashlight beam toward the floor, he could see the marks in the wood where more rings had once been attached. The air inside the cells was stale, thick with the musty smells of rotting wood and rodent droppings. Just looking in from the relatively open space of the corridor made Sam's throat and chest tighten with claustrophobia.
"You know," Dean grumbled from behind him, "if I died in this shithole and a bunch of teenyboppers with a painted piece of cardboard summoned me back, I'd wanna break somebody's arm too."
Sam couldn't argue with that. "Speaking of painted cardboard, where the hell is it?"
They found the Ouija board on the floor under the back window. It was, as Dean had said, just a painted piece of cardboard, midnight blue, with a border of astrological symbols embossed in silver. The letters were also silver, in a fancy gothic font, and the i was dotted with a star. The planchette was a translucent triangle of pale aquamarine plastic in a pewter frame decorated with more stars on the corners.
"Hippie new-age woo-woo crap," Dean muttered. He kneeled to run the EMF meter over the board. "Nothing special about this thing. I bet any other board would've worked the same in this house."
"Which means destroying it probably won't help," Sam sighed. "Great. Why can't anything ever be simple?"
"Because then it wouldn't be any fun." Dean grinned and stood up, dusting off the knees of his jeans. "So, any bright ideas?"
"Just the usual," Sam told him. "Wait until dark, then use the board ourselves to summon whatever it was that the girls summoned, and send it back." Sam had never seen it done himself, but Dad, Caleb and Bobby all swore by it.
Dean looked as if he was about to agree, but then his face suddenly went hard, and he jutted his chin forward stubbornly.
"No."
"Huh? What are you talking about Dean? You know as well as I do this is how it's done. Anything summoned by an Ouija board needs to be sent back by the same board. That's how these things work."
"Yeah, well, that's not how we're gonna do it." The mulish look on Dean's face didn't falter. "We'll think of something else."
"Why?"
"Because."
"Because why?"
Dean stared at the wall behind Sam's shoulder with an expression that said he was prepared to keep staring until the next millennium. Sam resisted the urge to grab and shake him.
"Dean..."
"I don't want you messing with the board, okay?" Dean blurted out. "It's not safe."
"Not safe," Sam repeated blankly. "Right. As opposed to... the sweet fluffy-bunny things we normally mess with?"
"Screw you." Dean rolled his eyes. "You know what I mean. Ouija boards are especially dangerous for people who are... sensitive."
"Sensi--" Sam blinked in confusion for a moment, wondering if this was going to be another one of those "oh, you're such a touchy-feely girl" routines Dean found so hilarious. Then comprehension dawned. "You mean psychic.." He glared accusingly at his brother, who shrugged a little and scuffed one foot in the dust. "You said it didn't freak you out."
"It doesn't," Dean said quickly. "But that doesn't mean I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist. That big college-boy brain of yours is receiving all sorts of freaky shit from who-knows-where these days, and doing a seance strikes me as a really, really bad idea. So we think of something else."
"Okay." Sam slouched against the wall next to the window and folded his arms across his chest. "Go ahead. Think of something else."
"I will." Dean scratched the back of his neck. "Give me a minute."
Sam let about thirty seconds crawl by before tapping one foot on the floor. "I'm waiting."
"Dude." Dean scowled at him. "I can't think with you staring at me."
"This is bullshit, Dean. You know what we have to do, and you don't want to do it because of me. Is that how it's going to be from now on? Am I a liability now?"
This was exactly what he'd been afraid of when he'd first told Dean about the nightmares, about the visions, about moving the cabinet. Well, no, that wasn't exactly true. There were a million other things he'd feared more. But the idea that Dean was going to adjust for him now, as if he had a handicap that needed accommodating, made him want to yell and kick the walls. He must've looked it, too, because Dean quickly held his hands out in a placating gesture.
"Come on, Sam, you know it's not like that. Any of the usual shit, it wouldn't make a difference. But these things--" He poked the board with the toe of his boot as if it was something long dead and poorly preserved. "Either they don't work at all or they're really bad news, there's never any middle. We don't know what those girls called up -- could be ghosts, could be another, stronger poltergeist, could be a minor demon for all we know. I just don't think we should be opening up a direct hotline into your head without knowing what might take advantage, that's all."
All right, so maybe that wasn't an entirely unreasonable objection. Sam wasn't totally sure he believed it, but it wasn't unreasonable. He took a steadying breath and got a grip on his rising temper with only minimal effort.
"Look, we can take precautions, okay? I won't touch the board -- you can run it, and I'll ask the questions. Anything goes wrong, you can close the board and end it. Totally your call." Ouija boards worked better with two people handling the planchette, but one would do in a pinch. And Sam knew his brother well enough to know that Dean would be more willing to go along if he thought he was in full control of the situation. "We can cast a circle of protection, too. Anything we summon will be stuck outside it."
"That might work..." Dean said dubiously.
Sam hurried to press the advantage. "It's the only thing we know will work, Dean. Come on. We've got just enough time to get our stuff from the car and make the circle."
"Fine," Dean muttered sulkily. "Don't come running to me when you start barfing pea soup and spinning your head around."
* * * * *
They poured the salt in a thick stream on the floor right around the board, using it to trace a pentagram within a circle. Sam read a blessing in Latin while Dean set down two pairs of shotguns where they would be easy to reach without disturbing the salt. It was way more precaution than they usually went through for a simple haunting, but Sam could see that Dean still wasn't entirely satisfied. He didn't say anything, but the wary looks he kept shooting in Sam's direction spoke volumes. Telling him to stop worrying would be pointless, so Sam just pretended not to notice.
As the sun went down, he attic went from gloomy to pitch-black. The air grew steadily colder -- far colder than it had any business being, indoors at this time of year. The beam of Sam's flashlight dimmed and flickered for a minute, then went out altogether, and the two spares Dean dug from his duffel did no better.
"Damn," Dean said cheerfully into the darkness, "can't work the board if I can't see it. Guess we'd better think of something else."
"I have candles in my backpack," Sam said. Dean growled something indistinct under his breath. For a moment Sam thought they were going to argue again, but the growling subsided into a resigned huff of breath, and a few seconds later Dean flicked on his lighter so that Sam could see.
He put a votive candle at each point of the pentagram, and Dean bent down to light them, wrinkling his nose as he did so.
"Dude, are these flower scented?"
"They were on sale," Sam said defensively.
Dean smirked at him as he tucked the lighter back into his pocket. "Admit it, Sammy, you just have a thing for gardenias."
Sam snorted, and Dean's expression instantly turned defensive.
"What?"
"You could tell that was gardenia scent? I had to check the labels to find out."
"Yeah, well..." Dean looked flustered for a moment, but recovered quickly. "There was this chick in a flower shop in Savannah--"
"Whatever." Sam quickly held up a hand to forestall yet another tale of Dean's sexual exploits. "Can we get on with this, please?"
"Yeah, fine, getting on." Dean sat down Indian-style on the floor, careful not to disturb the salt lines, and pulled the board over to lie in front of him. He rested his fingers lightly on top of the planchette. "Ready?"
Sam sat down on the other side of the board facing Dean. "Ready." A gust of icy wind rattled the window pane behind him as he spoke. It ruffled Sam's hair and made the shadows dance in the flickering candle flames, but didn't shift a single grain of salt out of place. "Looks like something else's ready, too." He took a notepad and pencil from his backpack and set the pad in his lap.
"Here we go, then." Dean slid the planchette toward the top left corner of the board, where the silver letters spelled out "Hello." He let it rest there as he closed his eyes and relaxed his hands.
Another gust swept down the hallway with a banshee-like howl. The cell doors flapped madly on their hinges, flying open and slamming shut over and over with wood-splintering force. Sam could hear the chains rattling against the walls, the roof beams groaning overhead. He shivered, pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head, and tightened his grip on the notepad.
"Hello," he called out, "is anyone there?" Stupid question, really, but it was the traditional way to start off, and as good a way as any of finding out if it -- whatever it might be -- was in a mood to respond with something besides door-slamming theatrics.
Dean's hands wobbled in place for a moment before guiding the planchette down toward the "Yes" in the lower left corner. The plastic triangle framed the word exactly, though Dean's eyes remained tightly closed. Sam poised his pencil over the notepad and leaned forward a little to get a better view of the board.
"Who are you?"
The wind that had still been stirring up the dust outside their circle died down abruptly. For a few seconds, everything went still. Then the howling started again, and the planchette began to zigzag over the board in random patterns, sliding from one letter to another so rapidly that it threatened to fly right out from under Dean's fingers. Sam tried to follow the sequence, to see what it was spelling out, but it was moving too fast for him to even read the letters, let alone write anything down.
Then the board itself started moving, inching across the floor with a wobbly, side-to-side motion as if trying to get a way from Dean. One corner of it came perilously close to a salt line, and Sam reached down with one hand to pin it in place.
As soon as his fingers touched the board, the world changed. It was like falling through a funhouse mirror into a distorted reflection. The attic was still there, but everything else was different. Pale sunlight gleamed through the window. The salt and the candles were gone. The Ouija board was gone. More to the point, Dean was gone, and that realization sent Sam scrambling to his feet, shouting his brother's name.
There was no answer. He could hear voices all around, but none of them sounded like Dean's. Some of the voices were sobbing. Others seemed to be moaning in fear or pain. In the distance, way down at the other end of the corridor, someone was singing, though the sound was too faint for Sam to pick out anything more than the faintest hint of a mournful melody.
Sam glanced around, searching for the source of the sounds, and realized for the first time that all the cell doors were not only shut but barred. They looked different, too -- newer, the wood less weathered, the iron fittings unmarked by rust. At the same time, everything looked kind of fuzzy, blurred around the edges, as if he was viewing a slightly out-of-focus projection of his surroundings instead of the real thing. Sam might've thought he was dreaming, except for the faint scent of gardenia candles still tickling his nose every time he breathed in.
"Dean!" he shouted again. No answer. He hadn't really expected one. Sam was starting to suspect that Dean wasn't the one who'd gone away.
He took a tentative step forward. His booted feet made no sound against the floor. In fact, he wasn't sure he was touching the floor at all. There was no pressure on the soles of his feet, no sensation of bearing his own weight. Walking suddenly became an awkward, unfamiliar activity. His center of gravity was gone -- not just shifted, but gone. Sam felt as if he had to hold every muscle in his body tense and rigid just to remain upright. He took two more steps, short and jerky, and laid one hand against the nearest door. Or rather, tried to lay a hand against it; his fingers passed through the wood as through a thick fog.
On the other side of the door, somebody yelped. Sam started to call out, then stopped himself. He eyed the door warily for a few seconds, took a deep breath to steady himself, and walked right through the wood into the cell on the other side.
There was a girl there, crouched on a frayed blanket in the corner furthest from the door. The light from the corridor was too dim to illuminate the cell, and for a moment all Sam could make out was her silhouette, huddled and shaking against the wall. Then his eyes adjusted, and he couldn't suppress a startled hiss.
There was blood everywhere: soaking the front of the girl's once-white shift from waist to hem, staining her hands and face, turning most of the blanket the color of ancient rust. Sam was suddenly deeply grateful that he couldn't smell his surroundings. Just seeing the gore was enough to turn his stomach. He swallowed hard, wincing at the sour burn of bile in his throat, and took a cautious step forward.
Not cautious enough apparently -- the girl immediately tried to scurry away from him, even though there was no place for her to go. Her bare feet scrabbled on the floor as she pressed her back harder and harder against the wall, and her breath came in harsh wheezing gasps. The skirt of her shift rode up a little from her movements, and Sam saw that her left ankle was shackled, attached to the floor by a couple of feet of thick iron chain.
Sam stepped back, feeling sick, and held his empty hands out in front of him.
"It's all right," he said, pitching his voice soft and low, and tried to look as harmless and unthreatening as a man his size possibly could. "I won't hurt you."
She stilled, but did not relax. Sam could see her eyes now, opened so wide that a ring of white was visible around each iris. She was small and bony, with dark skin and a tangle of wiry, sweat-dampened black hair. The fear that distorted her face made it hard to judge her age, but Sam thought she was young, probably closer to Stacey's age than to his own. He gave her his best reassuring smile as he slowly lowered himself to the floor, keeping his hands in sight the whole time. Even sitting with his back bowed and his shoulders hunched he was still gigantic compared to her, but at least he wasn't looming quite so much.
"I won't hurt you," he repeated. "Please don't be afraid." It was, he suspected, a very stupid thing to say, but Sam was damned if he could think of any non-stupid things to say under the circumstances. Then again, past experience had taught him that when a person got this scared, what you said to them didn't matter. It was tone and body language that got the message across. So he kept slouching, kept saying "it's all right" and "don't be afraid" over and over again until she stopped trying to push herself through the wall and looked at him with eyes that were wary but not terrified.
"You the devil?" she demanded abruptly.
"Uhm... no." Sam couldn't quite hold back an awkward laugh, though it was clear enough that she wasn't joking. "My name is Sam. I... I'd like to help you, if I can."
She gave a short, bitter laugh and pushed her hair back from her face with a shaking hand.
"You can't help me," she said in a harsh voice, "I'm dead."
"Right... you noticed. That's... good." Sam shifted awkwardly in his seat and heroically resisted the impulse to pull at his hair. This was one of the more bizarre conversations he'd ever had and given his life, that was really saying something. "Look, the thing is, you're not supposed to be here, okay? And I can help you go to-- to wherever you're supposed to be. I think."
She stared at him in silence for a long time before turning away to examine the cell around them. "Is this hell, then?" she asked. "I had wondered. I didn't think I'd been so very wicked."
"This isn't hell." Sam shook his head. "Listen, uhm... do you have a name?"
"Olivia."
"Okay. Olivia. Do you... do you recognize this place? This cell, this house?"
"Yes." She shivered and gave a quick, jerky nod.
"Do you remember what happened to you? How you died?"
"I had a baby..." Olivia ran one hand down the front of her stained shift and looked down at the smear of blood on her palm. Her eyes suddenly went wide and unfocused. Sam wondered if it was possible for a ghost to faint. "Where did--" She glanced around wildly. "Did it die with me? Is it here?" Her breath hitched, and the air in the cell seemed to vibrate. Sam felt a crackle of energy sparking along his skin, raising goosebumps on his arms and the back of his neck. Olivia pushed away from the wall and lurched toward him, landing awkwardly on her knees as the chain on her ankle pulled taut. "Please, sir, it can't be here! Surely the Lord wouldn't send a tiny baby to hell just for being mine, would He? Please--"
She reached out to grip Sam's shoulder, but her fingers passed right through with no resistance. Sam had expected the not-touch to feel cold, the way ghosts normally did, but all he felt was a faint tingling, as if his arm was falling asleep. Olivia jerked her hand back with a gasp, and Sam realized that he was the intangible spirit here, not her.
The vibration in the air grew more intense. Sam felt as if he was trapped inside a giant bell that someone was striking over and over again. He couldn't hear the ringing, but he could feel each strike right down to his bones. Then the howling came again, similar to what he'd heard when Dean first touched the Ouija board, but louder, and now Sam could tell that it wasn't one voice but many. One of them sounded like a baby crying. Beside him, Olivia curled in on herself and flung her arms over her head. Sam knew he couldn't touch her, couldn't help or comfort, but he found himself reaching out anyway. His arm felt strangely heavy -- he hadn't even noticed how weightless he'd been in this place until the weightlessness disappeared -- and he froze when he saw his own hand flickering in front of his face, like an old film skipping frames.
The world around him blurred into fog. The howling cut off into silence. The heaviness in Sam's arm spread to the rest of his body, and he felt himself being pulled down, as if sinking into icy water. A band of pressure squeezed his chest, stopping his breath for a moment, then abruptly released. Sam jerked, sucked in a lungful of air, and found himself staring up into Dean's wide-eyed face.
"Sam! Sammy! You still with me, man?"
"No," Sam said thickly, and blacked out.
Chapter 4