SPN fic: "Occasional Demons" 5/7 (PG, gen)
Notes and disclaimers in Chapter 1
Chapter 5
"Salinity eighteen, nutrients eleven!" Shelley called out, sliding a pair of glass bottles into their numbered slots in the plastic carrying case. Sam lifted one hand in acknowledgements and jotted the bottle numbers down on his clipboard, in the column labeled "Salt & Nuts."
"Joel, where are you at?"
"Oxygen twelve."
They had it down to the routine after three days: Sam standing off to the side with his pencil and clipboard while the other students -- the real students, Sam kept reminding himself -- clustered around the CTD rosette, drawing water samples from the cylindrical bottles bolted to its circular metal frame. Writing numbers on a spreadsheet wasn't exactly an exciting job, but it was one that Sam could do without fear of messing it up or danger of getting his cast soaked again. He'd been making a point of volunteering for every tedious but simple task that arose -- there was a hell of a lot of those -- while following Claire's advice to tell everyone he was a first-year grad student with no prior experience in oceanography. The strategy was working well so far; the rest of the science team had accepted him easily and took his endless questions in stride. No one seemed to notice or care that the questions were more concerned with the accidents on the Stommel than with the actual research being done.
There had been two more close calls since the Great Monitor Boom of Saturday afternoon. One of the biology students had gotten a cable looped around his ankle during a plankton net tow, and came within a couple of inches of being dragged overboard before Jiang Wu and Tomiko hauled him back. And a winch cable had snapped while the rosette was being lowered for sampling, just missing one of the tech guys when the broken ends whipped back. Sam hadn't thought that one was such a big deal until Dean, who had been there when it happened, had explained in gory detail exactly what could happen when a steel cable with twelve hundred pounds of tension on it suddenly snapped.
"Guy could've been sliced in half," Dean had said, sounding actually shaken by the idea, and showed Sam the deep gouge in the metal deck where the cable end had struck.
He and Dean had worked out their own routine, each of them staying up a few hours past the end of their respective shifts in order to compare notes and get a few more cabin searches in. They had gone through about a third of Claire's list, but found nothing that jumped up and screamed "EVIL!" at them, even if Dean did still insist that the stack of pornographic comic books they'd unearthed in Joel's luggage needed to be dunked in holy water. ("Those things had tentacles, Sam. That's just wrong.")
Sam also managed to get on the internet for at least a couple of hours every day and check his e-mail every few hours, but the only news so far was a note from Bobby saying he'd passed on Sam's pictures of the disk to a friend for translating. Sam occasionally thought about just showing the disk to Tomiko and asking what she could make of it, but decided to hold off a few more days. The isolated, self-contained environment of the ship was making him even more self-conscious than usual about the facade of normalcy he still tried to present to other people. If something on the disk freaked Tomiko out, Sam would still be stuck in close quarters with her for the next three and a half weeks.
Not to mention the fact that he had no real reason to believe the disk was important. Nothing but the memory of the bookshop owner's amused gaze and the vague, nagging feeling that his impulse to go into the shop hadn't been a coincidence. He wished he could remember what the old guy had offered to Dean. He wished he knew which one of them was right: Dean for refusing the offering, or himself for accepting.
"Salinity nineteen, nutrients twelve!"
"Oxygen thirteen!"
"Carbon nine!"
"Got it," Sam said, and went back to being the Guy Who Logged the Bottle Numbers. Life was a lot simpler that way.
The sampling finished just in time for dinner. Sam stuck his hard hat and orange work vest (required for all on-deck work) back onto their pegs in the storeroom and went to join the line at the galley. The food, he'd discovered, was remarkably similar to the diner fare he and Dean were accustomed to: heavy on the starch and animal protein, everything either baked or fried. The salad bar was mostly iceberg lettuce and sliced carrots, but Sam loaded up on it anyway. Claire had warned him that by the end of the cruise they'd be down to shredded cabbage and canned green beans.
He got a plate of baked ziti to go with the salad and came over to sit with Tomiko, whose dinner appeared to consist of a whole wheat roll, an apple and a packet of what looked like wasabi-flavored soybeans. She smiled in greeting and slid over on the bench to make room for him. There was still a strip of plaster on her cheek where the piece from the exploding monitor, but other than that she looked none the worse for wear.
"Want some?" She held out the soybean packet towards him. "They're supposed to be good luck. I figure on this ship, we could use it."
"Soybeans are good luck?" Sam took a couple and popped them into his mouth. Some of the random trivia he'd picked up from his recent research was starting to come back to him. "Wait, aren't they supposed to drive away demons or something?"
"That's right." Tomiko turned the packed over for Sam's inspection. The logo on the side showed a fanged, wild-haired figure in a tiger skin loincloth inside a red circle with a diagonal line through it. Sam had read enough to recognize an Oni when he saw one.
"Aren't you supposed to throw those at the demons?" he said. "Won't help much if you eat them all first."
Tomiko shrugged and ate another handful. "There's more where these came from." She fluttered one hand in the general direction of the soda dispenser. Sam knew there was a stash of junk food in the cupboard under it, but it had never occurred to him to examine the contents for demon repellent.
He waited a couple of hours after the dinner shift ended before taking an empty backback into the deserted galley and digging through the cupboard. The soybeans were there, several dozen packets hidden behind a box of candy bars and a collection of bizarrely-flavored potato chips from Australia and New Zealand (Marmite? Smoked salmon? Who the hell came up with that stuff?) Sam stuffed as many packets as he could fit into the pack and carried them back to the lab. He was going through his research notes for the thousandth time and downloading his e-mail when Claire came in, looking pale and harried.
"Sam," she hissed into his ear, "come out on deck with me, we need to talk."
It was dark outside, and quiet except for the steady background hum of the ship's engines. The night sky held more stars than Sam had ever seen from land, even in the most remote spots he and Dean had wandered into. Claire made her way to a clear spot near the railing and Sam followed.
"Look, I don't mean to pressure you guys." Claire's face was an indistinct blur in the dark, but she sounded shaky and frightened. "But do you have any idea what's going on yet? Or how to stop it? Because it really, really needs to be stopped, Sam, I mean it, it can't keep going on like this--"
Sam put one hand on her shoulder. "What happened, Claire?"
"Jiang Wu's been hurt. He was down in the cargo hold getting another set of bottles for the carbon sampling, and one of the equipment crates came down on top of him. There's no way it could've just come loose like that, everything down there is tied down. I checked it, Jiang Wu checked it, Eduardo checked it..." She pressed one hand against her mouth and drew in a shuddering breath. "He's unconscious. Skull fracture, broken nose, maybe some internal injuries we don't know about."
"I'm sorry," Sam said. He'd had little opportunity to speak with the other chief scientist since the cruise had started, but he knew that Claire had been friends with Jiang Wu for years.
"We're turning around. There's a Coast Guard cutter coming out to meet us, to evacuate him to a hospital in Maui -- we don't have the facilities to take care of him in the infirmary. But I'm starting to wonder if I should tell the captain to just keep going all the way back to Honolulu. Cancel the rest of the cruise. I have no idea how I'd explain to the NSF, but we can't just keep going if there's something on board trying to kill people."
Sam couldn't really argue with that. The further out to sea they got the more vulnerable they were. He really didn't want to find out what would happen if someone needed urgent medical attention when they were two week out.
"How long until we meet the cutter?"
"About eighteen hours."
"You don't have to decide anything until then, right? Let me and Dean keep looking. Maybe we'll come up with something."
"All right." Claire didn't sound very optimistic, and Sam couldn't really blame her. "Let me know what you turn up."
"I will," Sam promised and went to wake up Dean, taking his backpack with him.
Dean wasn't in his cabin. Sam went searching, and eventually found him in the winch room, elbows-deep in the wiring under the control console.
"Dude," Sam said, "you do now your shift doesn't start for another three hours, right?"
"No shit." Dean sat back on his heels. He looked harassed and ill-tempered, and had a smear of something greasy in his hair. "Woke up early. Went up to the crew lounge because I heard the coffee was better there, and got roped into this repair job because everyone else is already busy. I swear, if there's a single piece of equipment left on this freaking ship that hasn't broken down yet, I don't know what it is."
"Yeah well, we've got bigger problems." Sam said, and gave a quick recap of his conversation with Claire. "We have to find this thing fast, Dean. Before somebody actually gets killed."
"If you have any bright new ideas," Dean said, "I'm all ears."
"Actually, I do have an idea," Sam told him. "Soybeans."
"Soybeans." Dean gave Sam a blank look. "Is that supposed to be meaningful?"
"Kind of. I've been looking over my notes again, and I'm pretty sure we're dealing with an Oni. I found a mention in one of the articles about the Oni making whistling noises when they appear. Or not appear, in our case. And the way to drive off them is to throw soybeans at them."
Dean looked as if he couldn't quite make up his mind if he wanted to laugh or not. "You're kidding, right?"
"Nope. I think it works on the Oni the same way salt works on most of the things we hunt. There's actually a festival in early spring where people cleanse their houses of demonic influences by throwing soybeans around and doing a chant."
"Okay," Dean said, "but do the houses actually have any demonic influences to begin with? I mean, how do we know it'll work?"
"We don't." Sam shrugged. "But it shows up consistently in every source I checked. I say we toss some beans on any item that looks suspicious, do the chant and see what happens."
"Sure," Dean said cheerfully. "And if it doesn't work, or if our monster's not an Oni, maybe it'll laugh itself to death at the two idiots throwing healthy snack food at it. Have we actually got any soybeans?"
"Right here." Sam dug a packet from the backpack and tossed it to Dean. "It's even got a cute Oni-be-gone logo on it. That means it's bound to work right?"
"Huh." Dean examined the packet curiously. "Is that what an Oni actually looks like?"
"Well, the tiger-skin underwear is kind of optional, and some representations show them with three eyes, but other than that, yeah, that's the general idea."
"In that case," Dean said, "I know exactly where we can try this out first."
They climbed up to deck four, the highest deck below the bridge and one where Sam hadn't had occasion to search before. It looked somewhat classier than the lower decks, with framed nature prints on the corridor walls and small brass plaques on the cabin doors engraved with the names of the Stommel's senior crew members. A larger plaque on the rearmost door identified it as the crew lounge.
"If I hadn't been running all over the damn ship fixing things all this time," Dean said, "I would've spotted it before now. Check this out." He opened the door and waved Sam through.
There was a porcelain mask on the wall above the TV cabinet. It looked fairly old, with bald patches in its shaggy horsehair mane and a fine webwork of hairline cracks in the rust-colored glaze of its face. Its features fit all the classic Oni descriptions, complete with the three eyes, the horns and the fanged, scowling mouth.
"I think," Dean announced, looking highly pleased with himself, "we have our prime suspect."
"Right." Sam dug in the backpack's side pocket and pulled out one of the internet articles he'd printed earlier. "It says here we're supposed to throw the beans at it and say 'Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!' You want to throw or chant?"
Dean ripped open a packet with his teeth and grabbed a handful of the beans. "I'll throw."
Sam repeated the chant three times, just in case, while Dean chucked the beans. He wasn't really sure what to expect. With the Latin exorcism, he'd always felt the power in the words as he spoke them, a faint, crackling pressure somewhere inside his skull. He was half-expecting this to feel the same, but there was nothing. Just syllables in an unfamiliar language, awkward on his tongue. Sam wondered how much difference it made, whether or not the speaker knew the language.
Still, the chant must've had some effect, or maybe the soybeans worked all by themselves, because as soon as the first few hit the mask, the lights flickered. The TV cabinet shuddered, and the crew's collection of videotapes rattled ominously on the shelves.
"Cool," Dean said, and tossed another handful of beans.
A low, tuneless whistle drifted across the room. The framed poster of the Sydney skyline that was hanging on the wall opposite the TV crashed to the floor with a spray of broken glass. Sam hissed at a sudden sharp sting across the back of his left hand, looked down to see blood welling up in a thin line where a stray piece had struck.
"Uh, Dean? I think we might have a problem here."
"I've noticed." Dean edged toward the door, not taking his eyes off the mask, which was now hanging just a bit askew. "I think we should-- get down!"
Sam dropped to the floor without thinking, instinct taking over at the whip-crack of command in Dean's voice. His cast banged against the floor, sending a sharp jolt up his arm and making him gasp. The TV smashed into the doorjamb above and behind him, right at the height where his head would've been. He rolled over onto his hands and knees just as the ceiling light sputtered out.
"Fuck." Dean's voice was harsh and breathless in the dark. "Sam, you all right?"
"I'm good." Sam scooted toward the door, still keeping low, all senses on high alert in case any other piece furniture decided to turn into a projectile weapon. He found the doorknob by feel, opened the door and was relieved to find the lights in the corridor still working. Still, he didn't stand upright again until he was no longer in direct line with the door.
Dean staggered out after him and slammed the door shut. There were bits of broken glass in his hair, but he didn't seem to be injured.
"Well, that sucked," he muttered.
Sam glanced from side to side, wary of anything that might attack them in the narrow confines of the corridor, but everything was quiet. The lights weren't even flickering anymore.
"I think it's done for the time being," he said.
"Great." Dean scowled at the door. "What do we do when it starts up again?"
"Good question," Sam sighed. "We need to contain it somehow."
"Right." Dean took a step toward the door, stopped, and looked at Sam's empty hands with an annoyed frown. "What'd you do with your backpack of magic beans?"
"I think I dropped it when the TV attacked me." There was no way Sam was going back through that door just to get it. "There's lots more in the galley, though."
"That's good," Dean said, "'cause I think I have a plan."
They went downstairs together, detouring just long enough for Dean to grab a sheet of paper and a magic marker from one of the computer labs to make an "out of order" sign for the staff lounge door.
"How can a lounge be out of order?" Sam asked. Dean glared at him.
"Who cares? I just want people to stay the fuck out."
In the galley, Sam hauled all the remaining soybean packets out of the cupboard while Dean grabbed one of the large plastic tubs the cook used for soaking dishes.
"Here." He thumped the tub down on the floor next to Sam. "Start opening the bags and dumping the beans out."
"Right." Sam ripped the corner off a packet and emptied it into the tub. "You wanna tell me why?"
"Remember that job in Albany eight years ago? The possessed ventriloquist's dummy?"
"Sort of." Sam reached for another packet while he ransacked his memory for details of the job in question. "Dad had to bury it in a box of salt before he could carry it outside to be burned, right?-- So wait, you're going to bury that mask in a tub of soybeans?"
"Don't look at me," Dean said, "you're the one who came up with the idea in the first place."
It took about twenty minutes of the two of them working together to empty all the packets. There wasn't enough to actually fill the tub, but they got about four inches of beans covering the bottom, and Dean pronounced it sufficient. Since they really didn't have a choice in the matter, Sam summoned up his last remaining shreds of optimism and hoisted the tub onto his shoulder for the climb back up to deck four.
The "out of order" sign was still taped to the lounge door, so presumably no one had gone in to get brained by flying furniture. Sam set the tub down and pressed his ear to the door, but could hear nothing on the other side.
"Ready?" Dean whispered behind him.
"Not really," Sam sighed and pushed the door open.
The lights started flickering again immediately. Sam took two steps forward, and an oversized atlas dislodged itself from a shelf on the far side of the room to fly straight at him. Sam ducked, and heard a thud and a grunt behind him.
"Dean, are you all right?"
"I'm fabulous. Just get the fucking thing, will you?"
More random items took flight all around the room as Sam reached for the mask. A videotape in a plastic case smacked his elbow. The remote from the TV bounced off the top of his head. An armchair glided across the floor, gaining speed as it went, until Dean intercepted it with a flying tackle.
"Move it, Sammy!"
"I'm moving!" Sam snatched the Oni mask from the wall and made a dive for the tub. He could feel it vibrating in his hand, and the whistling it had been emitting earlier now sounded like a high-pitched shriek. Sam thought he could see its painted eyes rolling, but that may have been just the adrenaline making him see things. He growled "'Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!" a couple more times just in case, and jammed the mask down into the tub, scooping handfuls of the beans over it until it was completely covered.
The lights went out for a moment, then came on again bright and steady. There was a series of thumps and clattering noises as all the things that had gone airborne abruptly dropped to the floor. Sam waited a few seconds longer, braced for another attack, but nothing happened.
"Wow," he said, "that actually worked."
The room looked as if a hurricane had hit it. The contents of the video cabinet and most of the bookshelves were scattered all over the floor. Most of the smaller pieced of furniture had been upended, and shredded magazines littered the carpet like confetti. Dean staggered over, looking slightly dazed and covering a bloody nose with one hand.
"Did you get it?"
"Yeah, I got it." Sam kicked the side of the tub with one foot. "The question is, what do we do with it now?"
"That's a good question. Think we could just leave it there till the end of the cruise?" Dean squatted next to the tub and prodded at the contents with one finger until Sam hauled him back by the collar.
"Goddamn it, Dean, don't poke it!"
"What? You poked it earlier."
"With my boot. From the outside. What is it with this thing you have about poking things that could bite your hand off?"
"It's not going to bite my-- Ow!" Dean jerked his hand back and stuck one finger in his mouth. "Son of a bitch, I think it did bite me."
Sam would've laughed, except that the lights were going wonky again and the junk on the floor was starting to rattle. Apparently, leaving the oni buried in the tub for the next three weeks wasn't going to be an option.
"We could just toss it overboard," he suggested.
Dean looked dubious. "I don't know, what if it can swim or something? I don't want it washing up on a beach somewhere and wiping out a fishing village."
"Maybe there's a spell or something for getting rid of it." Sam lifted the tub again, careful to keep all his fingers on the outside. "Let's go back and check what we've got."
None of the articles Sam had printed out or saved on the laptop contained any handy descriptions of Oni-banishing spells. There was, however, an e-mail from Bobby waiting in Sam's inbox.
"Huh." Sam scrolled through the attachment. "Bobby finally got the translation for the stuff I sent him."
"What, you mean for that crappy coaster you got in Honolulu? What does it say?"
"Apparently, it's an invocation to summon Shoki. Or Zhongkui or Chung Kuei, take your pick."
"Gesundheit," Dean said. "And who the hell is Shoki when he's at home?"
"A guardian spirit of some sort." The name rang a faint bell from Sam's earlier reading, so he began pulling up his most recently accessed documents one by one, skimming quickly through screen after screen of scanned text. "Right, here we go. Shoki the demon-queller. Supposed to be the spirit of a physician who committed suicide on a palace steps after being rejected from Imperial service. The emperor ordered him to be buried with highest honors, and in gratitude, Shoki's spirit has undertaken to protect the emperor's subjects from demons."
"Demons in this case being the Oni?"
"Yeah." Sam drummed his fingers against the side of the laptop. "That's kinda... handy."
"A little too handy if you ask me." Dean didn't look happy at all. "We walk into a random shop in Honolulu to pick up a guidebook, and a crazy old guy in a dress just hands us the spell we need days before we even know we'll need it? Yeah, right, tell me another one."
"I don't think it was random," Sam said. "I told you before, I had a feeling about that guy." He could tell from the pinched look on Dean's face exactly what his brother thought of that statement, but it still remained true. Sam had liked the old man in the bookshop at once, for no particular reason that he could point to, and he'd known he was going to buy that disk the moment his hand had touched it. But he couldn't say why, and he knew that he couldn't even attempt to explain his response without making Dean even more suspicous. So all Sam said was, "I think he was trying to help."
"Yeah, right," Dean snorted. "Since when do people just randomly try to help?"
"Uhm, we do it all the time, Dean."
"You know what I mean." Dean looked annoyed. "Since when do people just randomly try to help us?"
Sam shrugged. "Maybe we're due. Anyway, we have a demon." He kicked the side of the tub again, making the soybeans rattle. "And we have a spell to call up a demon-queller. I say we put it to use."
"No way." Neither Dean's voice nor the look in his eyes allowed for any possibility of further discussion. "We're not summoning a spirit here, Sam. We don't know what it'll do."
"Guardian spirit, Dean. It'll be on our side."
"You willing to bet the whole ship on it? From what you've told me, we're talking about the ghost of a guy who killed himself in a hissy fit because he got turned down for a job. Does that sound very helpful to you? 'Cause it sounds like the sort of thing we normally salt and burn to me."
Sam shook his head. He should've known this was going to happen. Dean had always resisted, not just with skepticism but with outright hostility, the idea that anything supernatural could ever be on his side. Sometimes, looking in the mirror late at night, Sam wondered exactly how far Dean was going to take that resistance. But he could never quite bring himself to raise that particular question aloud, and now was definitely not the time.
It didn't help that Sam himself didn't feel entirely convinced by his own argument. All the information he had on Shoki consisted of a short note from Bobby and a two-paragraph sidebar in an article he'd downloaded a week before from a site whose credentials he couldn't even remember now. Back on land, with libraries and bookstores and reliable internet access at his disposal, Sam would've insisted on at least a couple of days of additional research before he attempted a summoning. Out here, though...
There wasn't much time to think about it. Even as Sam tried to formulate his answer, the tub bounced on the floor a couple of times. The beans shifted around with a soft rasping noise, as if something was burrowing beneath them. Sam had no idea how long the Oni would stay contained, and he had a feeling it would be really pissed when it broke free.
"All right," he said, "so what do you suggest, then?"
Dean grinned in that manic way he had that occasionally made Sam feel just a little unnerved. "I say we burn the sucker. That pretty much always works."
There was an incinerator in the engine room, which was a good thing, since Sam really didn't cherish the idea of starting a fire on board. Technically, Sam wasn't supposed to go into the engine room without supervision, but Dean's presence appeared to be supervision enough, since the technician on duty in the control room looked up from his monitor just long enough to mutter "Hi, Dean. Hi, whoever," before going back to his game of Tetris. If he noticed the big tub'o'beans that Sam and Dean had absolutely no excuse to be lugging around in that part of the ship (or any other part of the ship, for that matter), he gave no sign of it.
There were several sets of ear muffs hanging on a peg board near the engine room door, under a sign announcing that ear protection must be worn at all times. Dean tossed one set to Sam and watched him put it on, then grabbed one himself and pushed the door open. The muted, vibrating hum Sam had been hearing since they'd entered the control room grew noticeably louder. Dean gave a quick thumbs-up sign and led the way inside.
The engine room was much cleaner and more brightly lit than Sam had been expecting, and the engines themselves were painted in surprisingly cheery shades of blue and yellow. Sam followed Dean through two sets of heavy metal doors toward the incinerator, which sat all the way in the back and was painted a hideous shade of avocado green to differentiate it for the engines.
"I'm gonna get it started." Dean's voice was barely audible over the engine noise and the dampening effect of the ear muffs. "You wait till I open that chute in the top, then toss the mask in."
The sides of the tub shuddered faintly against Sam's hands, as if the Oni had heard Dean's words and was registering its objections to the proceedings. Sam set it down and gave Dean a quick nod.
"I'm ready when you are."
There were a couple of minutes of relative silence while Dean flipped switches and pumped a lever and watched a needle on a color-coded dial creep toward the border between green and yellow. When everything was arranged to his satisfaction, he opened the small chute in the incinerator's top and clapped Sam on the shoulder. Sam dug the mask from the tub and tossed it in. Dean slammed the chute cover back down, waited a few seconds and flipped more switches.
"Good riddance!" he announced, and gave Sam a thumbs-up again.
Sam was just about to return the gesture when the floor beneath his feet suddenly shuddered. The incinerator rocked from side to side, then bounced in place a few times and spewed a thick cloud of noxious yellowish smoke from under the chute flap. Sam backed away a couple of steps, his mind flashing with vivid technicolor images of the whole ship going up in a giant fireball.
"Uh, Dean?" The ear muffs made Sam's voice sound high and tinny to his own ears. He wasn't even sure if Dean could hear him. "Please tell me it's supposed to do that."
Dean was backing away too. "Not exactly."
The yellow smoke was coalescing into a spinning funnel cloud just above the floor, a miniature tornado bouncing off the wall between the incinerator and one of the yellow engines. It looked, Sam thought wildly, kind of like the Tasmanian Devil in the old Warner Brothers cartoons. As if to confirm that impression, the whirlwind growled and sputtered and suddenly sprouted a long, muscular arm covered in bristly rust-colored fur. Another arm popped out a moment later, this one gripping a massive club studded with metal spikes. Then the rest of the smoke turned solid, and the Oni was crouching in front of them, less than five feet away.
It would've been taller than Sam if it had been standing upright instead of slouching forward to drag its knuckles on the ground. Its face was an animated version of the mask, complete with the horns and the three eyes, and its fangs looked as if they'd bite through steel.
"Oookay..." Dean took another step back, never looking away from the club in the Oni's hand. "It was definitely not supposed to do that."
Before Sam could come up with a suitably snide response to that, the Oni lumbered forward and swung its club in a wide arc, smashing it into the floor with a heavy thud that left a dent in the spot where Dean would've been standing if Dean had been a fraction of a second slower. Sam felt the vibration from the impact right through the thick soles of his boots.
"We have to get it away from the engines!" Dean yelled.
Sam thought that "away from us" would be an even better idea, but "away from the engines" was a good start, he supposed. Falling back on the only thing that had worked so far, he scooped another handful of soybeans from the tub and tossed it at the Oni's scowling face. His mind picked that moment to completely blank on the chant, but apparently the beans did the job all by themselves: the Oni hissed at him and vanished in a puff of yellow smoke.
Dean turned in a slow circle, fingers twitching in a way that suggested he was itching for a shotgun as badly as Sam was.
"Where'd it go?"
"I don't know, but we have to find it fast." Sam bent down and shoveled soybeans into his shirt pockets. Dean followed suit, quickly filling the pockets of his overalls to bursting. "It's gone corporeal now. Who knows what sort of damage it might do."
The Oni, as they quickly discovered, made little effort to conceal its presence. They found dents in the stairs leading down to deck 3, a door smashed off its hinges on deck 2, and what looked like claw marks scoring the carpet in the corridor on the main deck. A few people poked their heads out of their cabins and labs to ask what was going on. Sam yelled at them to stay inside. Dean just swore at them, which probably translated to the same thing. Amazingly, no alarms had gone off yet, but Sam knew it was only a matter of time.
They could hear the crashing noises outside on the deck as they sprinted into the main lab. Claire and Shelley were there, staring at yet another smashed door with identical saucer-eyed expression.
"What was that thing?" Claire breathed in a weak voice as Sam brushed past her.
"Go back to your cabins!" he yelled.
"And stay there!" Dean added over his shoulder.
Dean would've sprinted right outside without pausing, but Sam held him back long enough to grab two life vests from the hangers near the door. Dean muttered something uncomplimentary about "anal-retentive, overgrown boy scouts" as he put his on, but Sam pretended not to hear.
They found the Oni out on the deck, smashing the chemistry van into a pile of twisted rubble. Sam spared a brief moment of sympathy for the U. Hawaii team and their weeks of wasted work before returning all his attention to the job at hand.
He tried not to think too hard about the fact that the job at hand consisted of trying to fight off a demon with some snack food.
Sam moved to try and flank the Oni on its right side. Dean circled around toward its left. The Oni growled at them and puffed into smoke again, only to reappear six feet away. It kept doing that over and over, every time Sam or Dean took aim at it. It was frustrating as hell, but after a few minutes Sam thought it was beginning to slow down.
"I think it's getting tired!" he called out.
"I sure as hell hope so," Dean shouted back, "because this is getting boring."
They were all the way at the stern now, on a clear section of the deck below the A-frame crane. When the Oni popped into sight yet again, it was crouched right up against the railing.
"Think we can get it to go overboard?" Sam yelled. Dean shrugged and dug into his hip pocket for more soybeans.
"It's worth a try."
They moved forward together, only to find themselves staring at an empty deck as the Oni disappeared again. A low growl and a scrape of claws against metal was all the warning they got when it reappeared behind them. Sam whirled around, raised his arm to throw, and had to hit the deck and roll to avoid a vicious sweep of the Oni's club. He came up on his knees, heard Dean yell his name somewhere nearby, and moved automatically in the direction of the sound only to get smacked down again as something heavy landed on his back. He tried to throw it off, failed, felt clawed fingers clawing at his hair and wrenching his head back.
The first impact of his forehead against the deck made his vision explode into scattered specks of white light. The second one made everything go black.
Sam woke up to blurred vision, ringing ears, and a headache that threatened to split his skull right down the middle. It took him a few minutes to resolve his surroundings into anything other than random blobs of color. He was lying on a cot in what looked like a very small, very dimly lit hospital room. There was a low, steady humming sound in the background, and at first Sam took it as yet another symptom of whatever was going on in his head. Then he remembered -- it was engine noise. Ship's engine. He was on a ship, and this was probably the infirmary, and he was in the infirmary because-- oh, shit.
"Dean?" Sam raised his head from the pillow and immediately wished he hadn't as his stomach contents made a sudden break for freedom. He swung his legs off the cot with a groan and barely made it in time to vomit into the sink on the opposite side of the room.
There were footsteps behind him, then hands cradling his head and brushing his hair out of the way. Even in his current concussed and miserable state, Sam knew that the hands were not Dean's. He brushed them off, wiped his mouth with the edge of his sleeve and turned around to see who it was.
"Claire? What happened? Where's Dean?"
"You shouldn't be moving around, Sam. You have a concussion."
"I know." Sam slowly climbed to his feet, ignoring Claire's attempts to steady him. "I've had concussions before, this one's not so bad. Where's Dean?"
"Sam--"
"He's all right, isn't he? I heard him yell before I got knocked out. Is he hurt? Did he get the Oni?"
"Sam--"
"Does he know I'm awake? You have to tell him, or he'll worry."
"Sam." Claire cupped her hands around Sam's elbows and steered him back to the cot. He tried to pull away, but his head still hurt and his legs were wobbly, and maybe it wasn't such a bad idea to sit down for just a little while. Maybe he could go sit with Dean. That would be good.
"Where's Dean, Claire?"
"Sam, I'm so sorry."
The words, and the tone they were spoken in, were like a cold finger down Sam's spine. He gripped the edge of the cot with white-knuckled hands and forced himself to keep breathing.
"Sorry for what? Where is he?"
"The crew's been searching the ship for the past two hours. Dean is not on board."
Chapter 6
Chapter 5
"Salinity eighteen, nutrients eleven!" Shelley called out, sliding a pair of glass bottles into their numbered slots in the plastic carrying case. Sam lifted one hand in acknowledgements and jotted the bottle numbers down on his clipboard, in the column labeled "Salt & Nuts."
"Joel, where are you at?"
"Oxygen twelve."
They had it down to the routine after three days: Sam standing off to the side with his pencil and clipboard while the other students -- the real students, Sam kept reminding himself -- clustered around the CTD rosette, drawing water samples from the cylindrical bottles bolted to its circular metal frame. Writing numbers on a spreadsheet wasn't exactly an exciting job, but it was one that Sam could do without fear of messing it up or danger of getting his cast soaked again. He'd been making a point of volunteering for every tedious but simple task that arose -- there was a hell of a lot of those -- while following Claire's advice to tell everyone he was a first-year grad student with no prior experience in oceanography. The strategy was working well so far; the rest of the science team had accepted him easily and took his endless questions in stride. No one seemed to notice or care that the questions were more concerned with the accidents on the Stommel than with the actual research being done.
There had been two more close calls since the Great Monitor Boom of Saturday afternoon. One of the biology students had gotten a cable looped around his ankle during a plankton net tow, and came within a couple of inches of being dragged overboard before Jiang Wu and Tomiko hauled him back. And a winch cable had snapped while the rosette was being lowered for sampling, just missing one of the tech guys when the broken ends whipped back. Sam hadn't thought that one was such a big deal until Dean, who had been there when it happened, had explained in gory detail exactly what could happen when a steel cable with twelve hundred pounds of tension on it suddenly snapped.
"Guy could've been sliced in half," Dean had said, sounding actually shaken by the idea, and showed Sam the deep gouge in the metal deck where the cable end had struck.
He and Dean had worked out their own routine, each of them staying up a few hours past the end of their respective shifts in order to compare notes and get a few more cabin searches in. They had gone through about a third of Claire's list, but found nothing that jumped up and screamed "EVIL!" at them, even if Dean did still insist that the stack of pornographic comic books they'd unearthed in Joel's luggage needed to be dunked in holy water. ("Those things had tentacles, Sam. That's just wrong.")
Sam also managed to get on the internet for at least a couple of hours every day and check his e-mail every few hours, but the only news so far was a note from Bobby saying he'd passed on Sam's pictures of the disk to a friend for translating. Sam occasionally thought about just showing the disk to Tomiko and asking what she could make of it, but decided to hold off a few more days. The isolated, self-contained environment of the ship was making him even more self-conscious than usual about the facade of normalcy he still tried to present to other people. If something on the disk freaked Tomiko out, Sam would still be stuck in close quarters with her for the next three and a half weeks.
Not to mention the fact that he had no real reason to believe the disk was important. Nothing but the memory of the bookshop owner's amused gaze and the vague, nagging feeling that his impulse to go into the shop hadn't been a coincidence. He wished he could remember what the old guy had offered to Dean. He wished he knew which one of them was right: Dean for refusing the offering, or himself for accepting.
"Salinity nineteen, nutrients twelve!"
"Oxygen thirteen!"
"Carbon nine!"
"Got it," Sam said, and went back to being the Guy Who Logged the Bottle Numbers. Life was a lot simpler that way.
The sampling finished just in time for dinner. Sam stuck his hard hat and orange work vest (required for all on-deck work) back onto their pegs in the storeroom and went to join the line at the galley. The food, he'd discovered, was remarkably similar to the diner fare he and Dean were accustomed to: heavy on the starch and animal protein, everything either baked or fried. The salad bar was mostly iceberg lettuce and sliced carrots, but Sam loaded up on it anyway. Claire had warned him that by the end of the cruise they'd be down to shredded cabbage and canned green beans.
He got a plate of baked ziti to go with the salad and came over to sit with Tomiko, whose dinner appeared to consist of a whole wheat roll, an apple and a packet of what looked like wasabi-flavored soybeans. She smiled in greeting and slid over on the bench to make room for him. There was still a strip of plaster on her cheek where the piece from the exploding monitor, but other than that she looked none the worse for wear.
"Want some?" She held out the soybean packet towards him. "They're supposed to be good luck. I figure on this ship, we could use it."
"Soybeans are good luck?" Sam took a couple and popped them into his mouth. Some of the random trivia he'd picked up from his recent research was starting to come back to him. "Wait, aren't they supposed to drive away demons or something?"
"That's right." Tomiko turned the packed over for Sam's inspection. The logo on the side showed a fanged, wild-haired figure in a tiger skin loincloth inside a red circle with a diagonal line through it. Sam had read enough to recognize an Oni when he saw one.
"Aren't you supposed to throw those at the demons?" he said. "Won't help much if you eat them all first."
Tomiko shrugged and ate another handful. "There's more where these came from." She fluttered one hand in the general direction of the soda dispenser. Sam knew there was a stash of junk food in the cupboard under it, but it had never occurred to him to examine the contents for demon repellent.
He waited a couple of hours after the dinner shift ended before taking an empty backback into the deserted galley and digging through the cupboard. The soybeans were there, several dozen packets hidden behind a box of candy bars and a collection of bizarrely-flavored potato chips from Australia and New Zealand (Marmite? Smoked salmon? Who the hell came up with that stuff?) Sam stuffed as many packets as he could fit into the pack and carried them back to the lab. He was going through his research notes for the thousandth time and downloading his e-mail when Claire came in, looking pale and harried.
"Sam," she hissed into his ear, "come out on deck with me, we need to talk."
It was dark outside, and quiet except for the steady background hum of the ship's engines. The night sky held more stars than Sam had ever seen from land, even in the most remote spots he and Dean had wandered into. Claire made her way to a clear spot near the railing and Sam followed.
"Look, I don't mean to pressure you guys." Claire's face was an indistinct blur in the dark, but she sounded shaky and frightened. "But do you have any idea what's going on yet? Or how to stop it? Because it really, really needs to be stopped, Sam, I mean it, it can't keep going on like this--"
Sam put one hand on her shoulder. "What happened, Claire?"
"Jiang Wu's been hurt. He was down in the cargo hold getting another set of bottles for the carbon sampling, and one of the equipment crates came down on top of him. There's no way it could've just come loose like that, everything down there is tied down. I checked it, Jiang Wu checked it, Eduardo checked it..." She pressed one hand against her mouth and drew in a shuddering breath. "He's unconscious. Skull fracture, broken nose, maybe some internal injuries we don't know about."
"I'm sorry," Sam said. He'd had little opportunity to speak with the other chief scientist since the cruise had started, but he knew that Claire had been friends with Jiang Wu for years.
"We're turning around. There's a Coast Guard cutter coming out to meet us, to evacuate him to a hospital in Maui -- we don't have the facilities to take care of him in the infirmary. But I'm starting to wonder if I should tell the captain to just keep going all the way back to Honolulu. Cancel the rest of the cruise. I have no idea how I'd explain to the NSF, but we can't just keep going if there's something on board trying to kill people."
Sam couldn't really argue with that. The further out to sea they got the more vulnerable they were. He really didn't want to find out what would happen if someone needed urgent medical attention when they were two week out.
"How long until we meet the cutter?"
"About eighteen hours."
"You don't have to decide anything until then, right? Let me and Dean keep looking. Maybe we'll come up with something."
"All right." Claire didn't sound very optimistic, and Sam couldn't really blame her. "Let me know what you turn up."
"I will," Sam promised and went to wake up Dean, taking his backpack with him.
Dean wasn't in his cabin. Sam went searching, and eventually found him in the winch room, elbows-deep in the wiring under the control console.
"Dude," Sam said, "you do now your shift doesn't start for another three hours, right?"
"No shit." Dean sat back on his heels. He looked harassed and ill-tempered, and had a smear of something greasy in his hair. "Woke up early. Went up to the crew lounge because I heard the coffee was better there, and got roped into this repair job because everyone else is already busy. I swear, if there's a single piece of equipment left on this freaking ship that hasn't broken down yet, I don't know what it is."
"Yeah well, we've got bigger problems." Sam said, and gave a quick recap of his conversation with Claire. "We have to find this thing fast, Dean. Before somebody actually gets killed."
"If you have any bright new ideas," Dean said, "I'm all ears."
"Actually, I do have an idea," Sam told him. "Soybeans."
"Soybeans." Dean gave Sam a blank look. "Is that supposed to be meaningful?"
"Kind of. I've been looking over my notes again, and I'm pretty sure we're dealing with an Oni. I found a mention in one of the articles about the Oni making whistling noises when they appear. Or not appear, in our case. And the way to drive off them is to throw soybeans at them."
Dean looked as if he couldn't quite make up his mind if he wanted to laugh or not. "You're kidding, right?"
"Nope. I think it works on the Oni the same way salt works on most of the things we hunt. There's actually a festival in early spring where people cleanse their houses of demonic influences by throwing soybeans around and doing a chant."
"Okay," Dean said, "but do the houses actually have any demonic influences to begin with? I mean, how do we know it'll work?"
"We don't." Sam shrugged. "But it shows up consistently in every source I checked. I say we toss some beans on any item that looks suspicious, do the chant and see what happens."
"Sure," Dean said cheerfully. "And if it doesn't work, or if our monster's not an Oni, maybe it'll laugh itself to death at the two idiots throwing healthy snack food at it. Have we actually got any soybeans?"
"Right here." Sam dug a packet from the backpack and tossed it to Dean. "It's even got a cute Oni-be-gone logo on it. That means it's bound to work right?"
"Huh." Dean examined the packet curiously. "Is that what an Oni actually looks like?"
"Well, the tiger-skin underwear is kind of optional, and some representations show them with three eyes, but other than that, yeah, that's the general idea."
"In that case," Dean said, "I know exactly where we can try this out first."
They climbed up to deck four, the highest deck below the bridge and one where Sam hadn't had occasion to search before. It looked somewhat classier than the lower decks, with framed nature prints on the corridor walls and small brass plaques on the cabin doors engraved with the names of the Stommel's senior crew members. A larger plaque on the rearmost door identified it as the crew lounge.
"If I hadn't been running all over the damn ship fixing things all this time," Dean said, "I would've spotted it before now. Check this out." He opened the door and waved Sam through.
There was a porcelain mask on the wall above the TV cabinet. It looked fairly old, with bald patches in its shaggy horsehair mane and a fine webwork of hairline cracks in the rust-colored glaze of its face. Its features fit all the classic Oni descriptions, complete with the three eyes, the horns and the fanged, scowling mouth.
"I think," Dean announced, looking highly pleased with himself, "we have our prime suspect."
"Right." Sam dug in the backpack's side pocket and pulled out one of the internet articles he'd printed earlier. "It says here we're supposed to throw the beans at it and say 'Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!' You want to throw or chant?"
Dean ripped open a packet with his teeth and grabbed a handful of the beans. "I'll throw."
Sam repeated the chant three times, just in case, while Dean chucked the beans. He wasn't really sure what to expect. With the Latin exorcism, he'd always felt the power in the words as he spoke them, a faint, crackling pressure somewhere inside his skull. He was half-expecting this to feel the same, but there was nothing. Just syllables in an unfamiliar language, awkward on his tongue. Sam wondered how much difference it made, whether or not the speaker knew the language.
Still, the chant must've had some effect, or maybe the soybeans worked all by themselves, because as soon as the first few hit the mask, the lights flickered. The TV cabinet shuddered, and the crew's collection of videotapes rattled ominously on the shelves.
"Cool," Dean said, and tossed another handful of beans.
A low, tuneless whistle drifted across the room. The framed poster of the Sydney skyline that was hanging on the wall opposite the TV crashed to the floor with a spray of broken glass. Sam hissed at a sudden sharp sting across the back of his left hand, looked down to see blood welling up in a thin line where a stray piece had struck.
"Uh, Dean? I think we might have a problem here."
"I've noticed." Dean edged toward the door, not taking his eyes off the mask, which was now hanging just a bit askew. "I think we should-- get down!"
Sam dropped to the floor without thinking, instinct taking over at the whip-crack of command in Dean's voice. His cast banged against the floor, sending a sharp jolt up his arm and making him gasp. The TV smashed into the doorjamb above and behind him, right at the height where his head would've been. He rolled over onto his hands and knees just as the ceiling light sputtered out.
"Fuck." Dean's voice was harsh and breathless in the dark. "Sam, you all right?"
"I'm good." Sam scooted toward the door, still keeping low, all senses on high alert in case any other piece furniture decided to turn into a projectile weapon. He found the doorknob by feel, opened the door and was relieved to find the lights in the corridor still working. Still, he didn't stand upright again until he was no longer in direct line with the door.
Dean staggered out after him and slammed the door shut. There were bits of broken glass in his hair, but he didn't seem to be injured.
"Well, that sucked," he muttered.
Sam glanced from side to side, wary of anything that might attack them in the narrow confines of the corridor, but everything was quiet. The lights weren't even flickering anymore.
"I think it's done for the time being," he said.
"Great." Dean scowled at the door. "What do we do when it starts up again?"
"Good question," Sam sighed. "We need to contain it somehow."
"Right." Dean took a step toward the door, stopped, and looked at Sam's empty hands with an annoyed frown. "What'd you do with your backpack of magic beans?"
"I think I dropped it when the TV attacked me." There was no way Sam was going back through that door just to get it. "There's lots more in the galley, though."
"That's good," Dean said, "'cause I think I have a plan."
They went downstairs together, detouring just long enough for Dean to grab a sheet of paper and a magic marker from one of the computer labs to make an "out of order" sign for the staff lounge door.
"How can a lounge be out of order?" Sam asked. Dean glared at him.
"Who cares? I just want people to stay the fuck out."
In the galley, Sam hauled all the remaining soybean packets out of the cupboard while Dean grabbed one of the large plastic tubs the cook used for soaking dishes.
"Here." He thumped the tub down on the floor next to Sam. "Start opening the bags and dumping the beans out."
"Right." Sam ripped the corner off a packet and emptied it into the tub. "You wanna tell me why?"
"Remember that job in Albany eight years ago? The possessed ventriloquist's dummy?"
"Sort of." Sam reached for another packet while he ransacked his memory for details of the job in question. "Dad had to bury it in a box of salt before he could carry it outside to be burned, right?-- So wait, you're going to bury that mask in a tub of soybeans?"
"Don't look at me," Dean said, "you're the one who came up with the idea in the first place."
It took about twenty minutes of the two of them working together to empty all the packets. There wasn't enough to actually fill the tub, but they got about four inches of beans covering the bottom, and Dean pronounced it sufficient. Since they really didn't have a choice in the matter, Sam summoned up his last remaining shreds of optimism and hoisted the tub onto his shoulder for the climb back up to deck four.
The "out of order" sign was still taped to the lounge door, so presumably no one had gone in to get brained by flying furniture. Sam set the tub down and pressed his ear to the door, but could hear nothing on the other side.
"Ready?" Dean whispered behind him.
"Not really," Sam sighed and pushed the door open.
The lights started flickering again immediately. Sam took two steps forward, and an oversized atlas dislodged itself from a shelf on the far side of the room to fly straight at him. Sam ducked, and heard a thud and a grunt behind him.
"Dean, are you all right?"
"I'm fabulous. Just get the fucking thing, will you?"
More random items took flight all around the room as Sam reached for the mask. A videotape in a plastic case smacked his elbow. The remote from the TV bounced off the top of his head. An armchair glided across the floor, gaining speed as it went, until Dean intercepted it with a flying tackle.
"Move it, Sammy!"
"I'm moving!" Sam snatched the Oni mask from the wall and made a dive for the tub. He could feel it vibrating in his hand, and the whistling it had been emitting earlier now sounded like a high-pitched shriek. Sam thought he could see its painted eyes rolling, but that may have been just the adrenaline making him see things. He growled "'Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!" a couple more times just in case, and jammed the mask down into the tub, scooping handfuls of the beans over it until it was completely covered.
The lights went out for a moment, then came on again bright and steady. There was a series of thumps and clattering noises as all the things that had gone airborne abruptly dropped to the floor. Sam waited a few seconds longer, braced for another attack, but nothing happened.
"Wow," he said, "that actually worked."
The room looked as if a hurricane had hit it. The contents of the video cabinet and most of the bookshelves were scattered all over the floor. Most of the smaller pieced of furniture had been upended, and shredded magazines littered the carpet like confetti. Dean staggered over, looking slightly dazed and covering a bloody nose with one hand.
"Did you get it?"
"Yeah, I got it." Sam kicked the side of the tub with one foot. "The question is, what do we do with it now?"
"That's a good question. Think we could just leave it there till the end of the cruise?" Dean squatted next to the tub and prodded at the contents with one finger until Sam hauled him back by the collar.
"Goddamn it, Dean, don't poke it!"
"What? You poked it earlier."
"With my boot. From the outside. What is it with this thing you have about poking things that could bite your hand off?"
"It's not going to bite my-- Ow!" Dean jerked his hand back and stuck one finger in his mouth. "Son of a bitch, I think it did bite me."
Sam would've laughed, except that the lights were going wonky again and the junk on the floor was starting to rattle. Apparently, leaving the oni buried in the tub for the next three weeks wasn't going to be an option.
"We could just toss it overboard," he suggested.
Dean looked dubious. "I don't know, what if it can swim or something? I don't want it washing up on a beach somewhere and wiping out a fishing village."
"Maybe there's a spell or something for getting rid of it." Sam lifted the tub again, careful to keep all his fingers on the outside. "Let's go back and check what we've got."
None of the articles Sam had printed out or saved on the laptop contained any handy descriptions of Oni-banishing spells. There was, however, an e-mail from Bobby waiting in Sam's inbox.
"Huh." Sam scrolled through the attachment. "Bobby finally got the translation for the stuff I sent him."
"What, you mean for that crappy coaster you got in Honolulu? What does it say?"
"Apparently, it's an invocation to summon Shoki. Or Zhongkui or Chung Kuei, take your pick."
"Gesundheit," Dean said. "And who the hell is Shoki when he's at home?"
"A guardian spirit of some sort." The name rang a faint bell from Sam's earlier reading, so he began pulling up his most recently accessed documents one by one, skimming quickly through screen after screen of scanned text. "Right, here we go. Shoki the demon-queller. Supposed to be the spirit of a physician who committed suicide on a palace steps after being rejected from Imperial service. The emperor ordered him to be buried with highest honors, and in gratitude, Shoki's spirit has undertaken to protect the emperor's subjects from demons."
"Demons in this case being the Oni?"
"Yeah." Sam drummed his fingers against the side of the laptop. "That's kinda... handy."
"A little too handy if you ask me." Dean didn't look happy at all. "We walk into a random shop in Honolulu to pick up a guidebook, and a crazy old guy in a dress just hands us the spell we need days before we even know we'll need it? Yeah, right, tell me another one."
"I don't think it was random," Sam said. "I told you before, I had a feeling about that guy." He could tell from the pinched look on Dean's face exactly what his brother thought of that statement, but it still remained true. Sam had liked the old man in the bookshop at once, for no particular reason that he could point to, and he'd known he was going to buy that disk the moment his hand had touched it. But he couldn't say why, and he knew that he couldn't even attempt to explain his response without making Dean even more suspicous. So all Sam said was, "I think he was trying to help."
"Yeah, right," Dean snorted. "Since when do people just randomly try to help?"
"Uhm, we do it all the time, Dean."
"You know what I mean." Dean looked annoyed. "Since when do people just randomly try to help us?"
Sam shrugged. "Maybe we're due. Anyway, we have a demon." He kicked the side of the tub again, making the soybeans rattle. "And we have a spell to call up a demon-queller. I say we put it to use."
"No way." Neither Dean's voice nor the look in his eyes allowed for any possibility of further discussion. "We're not summoning a spirit here, Sam. We don't know what it'll do."
"Guardian spirit, Dean. It'll be on our side."
"You willing to bet the whole ship on it? From what you've told me, we're talking about the ghost of a guy who killed himself in a hissy fit because he got turned down for a job. Does that sound very helpful to you? 'Cause it sounds like the sort of thing we normally salt and burn to me."
Sam shook his head. He should've known this was going to happen. Dean had always resisted, not just with skepticism but with outright hostility, the idea that anything supernatural could ever be on his side. Sometimes, looking in the mirror late at night, Sam wondered exactly how far Dean was going to take that resistance. But he could never quite bring himself to raise that particular question aloud, and now was definitely not the time.
It didn't help that Sam himself didn't feel entirely convinced by his own argument. All the information he had on Shoki consisted of a short note from Bobby and a two-paragraph sidebar in an article he'd downloaded a week before from a site whose credentials he couldn't even remember now. Back on land, with libraries and bookstores and reliable internet access at his disposal, Sam would've insisted on at least a couple of days of additional research before he attempted a summoning. Out here, though...
There wasn't much time to think about it. Even as Sam tried to formulate his answer, the tub bounced on the floor a couple of times. The beans shifted around with a soft rasping noise, as if something was burrowing beneath them. Sam had no idea how long the Oni would stay contained, and he had a feeling it would be really pissed when it broke free.
"All right," he said, "so what do you suggest, then?"
Dean grinned in that manic way he had that occasionally made Sam feel just a little unnerved. "I say we burn the sucker. That pretty much always works."
There was an incinerator in the engine room, which was a good thing, since Sam really didn't cherish the idea of starting a fire on board. Technically, Sam wasn't supposed to go into the engine room without supervision, but Dean's presence appeared to be supervision enough, since the technician on duty in the control room looked up from his monitor just long enough to mutter "Hi, Dean. Hi, whoever," before going back to his game of Tetris. If he noticed the big tub'o'beans that Sam and Dean had absolutely no excuse to be lugging around in that part of the ship (or any other part of the ship, for that matter), he gave no sign of it.
There were several sets of ear muffs hanging on a peg board near the engine room door, under a sign announcing that ear protection must be worn at all times. Dean tossed one set to Sam and watched him put it on, then grabbed one himself and pushed the door open. The muted, vibrating hum Sam had been hearing since they'd entered the control room grew noticeably louder. Dean gave a quick thumbs-up sign and led the way inside.
The engine room was much cleaner and more brightly lit than Sam had been expecting, and the engines themselves were painted in surprisingly cheery shades of blue and yellow. Sam followed Dean through two sets of heavy metal doors toward the incinerator, which sat all the way in the back and was painted a hideous shade of avocado green to differentiate it for the engines.
"I'm gonna get it started." Dean's voice was barely audible over the engine noise and the dampening effect of the ear muffs. "You wait till I open that chute in the top, then toss the mask in."
The sides of the tub shuddered faintly against Sam's hands, as if the Oni had heard Dean's words and was registering its objections to the proceedings. Sam set it down and gave Dean a quick nod.
"I'm ready when you are."
There were a couple of minutes of relative silence while Dean flipped switches and pumped a lever and watched a needle on a color-coded dial creep toward the border between green and yellow. When everything was arranged to his satisfaction, he opened the small chute in the incinerator's top and clapped Sam on the shoulder. Sam dug the mask from the tub and tossed it in. Dean slammed the chute cover back down, waited a few seconds and flipped more switches.
"Good riddance!" he announced, and gave Sam a thumbs-up again.
Sam was just about to return the gesture when the floor beneath his feet suddenly shuddered. The incinerator rocked from side to side, then bounced in place a few times and spewed a thick cloud of noxious yellowish smoke from under the chute flap. Sam backed away a couple of steps, his mind flashing with vivid technicolor images of the whole ship going up in a giant fireball.
"Uh, Dean?" The ear muffs made Sam's voice sound high and tinny to his own ears. He wasn't even sure if Dean could hear him. "Please tell me it's supposed to do that."
Dean was backing away too. "Not exactly."
The yellow smoke was coalescing into a spinning funnel cloud just above the floor, a miniature tornado bouncing off the wall between the incinerator and one of the yellow engines. It looked, Sam thought wildly, kind of like the Tasmanian Devil in the old Warner Brothers cartoons. As if to confirm that impression, the whirlwind growled and sputtered and suddenly sprouted a long, muscular arm covered in bristly rust-colored fur. Another arm popped out a moment later, this one gripping a massive club studded with metal spikes. Then the rest of the smoke turned solid, and the Oni was crouching in front of them, less than five feet away.
It would've been taller than Sam if it had been standing upright instead of slouching forward to drag its knuckles on the ground. Its face was an animated version of the mask, complete with the horns and the three eyes, and its fangs looked as if they'd bite through steel.
"Oookay..." Dean took another step back, never looking away from the club in the Oni's hand. "It was definitely not supposed to do that."
Before Sam could come up with a suitably snide response to that, the Oni lumbered forward and swung its club in a wide arc, smashing it into the floor with a heavy thud that left a dent in the spot where Dean would've been standing if Dean had been a fraction of a second slower. Sam felt the vibration from the impact right through the thick soles of his boots.
"We have to get it away from the engines!" Dean yelled.
Sam thought that "away from us" would be an even better idea, but "away from the engines" was a good start, he supposed. Falling back on the only thing that had worked so far, he scooped another handful of soybeans from the tub and tossed it at the Oni's scowling face. His mind picked that moment to completely blank on the chant, but apparently the beans did the job all by themselves: the Oni hissed at him and vanished in a puff of yellow smoke.
Dean turned in a slow circle, fingers twitching in a way that suggested he was itching for a shotgun as badly as Sam was.
"Where'd it go?"
"I don't know, but we have to find it fast." Sam bent down and shoveled soybeans into his shirt pockets. Dean followed suit, quickly filling the pockets of his overalls to bursting. "It's gone corporeal now. Who knows what sort of damage it might do."
The Oni, as they quickly discovered, made little effort to conceal its presence. They found dents in the stairs leading down to deck 3, a door smashed off its hinges on deck 2, and what looked like claw marks scoring the carpet in the corridor on the main deck. A few people poked their heads out of their cabins and labs to ask what was going on. Sam yelled at them to stay inside. Dean just swore at them, which probably translated to the same thing. Amazingly, no alarms had gone off yet, but Sam knew it was only a matter of time.
They could hear the crashing noises outside on the deck as they sprinted into the main lab. Claire and Shelley were there, staring at yet another smashed door with identical saucer-eyed expression.
"What was that thing?" Claire breathed in a weak voice as Sam brushed past her.
"Go back to your cabins!" he yelled.
"And stay there!" Dean added over his shoulder.
Dean would've sprinted right outside without pausing, but Sam held him back long enough to grab two life vests from the hangers near the door. Dean muttered something uncomplimentary about "anal-retentive, overgrown boy scouts" as he put his on, but Sam pretended not to hear.
They found the Oni out on the deck, smashing the chemistry van into a pile of twisted rubble. Sam spared a brief moment of sympathy for the U. Hawaii team and their weeks of wasted work before returning all his attention to the job at hand.
He tried not to think too hard about the fact that the job at hand consisted of trying to fight off a demon with some snack food.
Sam moved to try and flank the Oni on its right side. Dean circled around toward its left. The Oni growled at them and puffed into smoke again, only to reappear six feet away. It kept doing that over and over, every time Sam or Dean took aim at it. It was frustrating as hell, but after a few minutes Sam thought it was beginning to slow down.
"I think it's getting tired!" he called out.
"I sure as hell hope so," Dean shouted back, "because this is getting boring."
They were all the way at the stern now, on a clear section of the deck below the A-frame crane. When the Oni popped into sight yet again, it was crouched right up against the railing.
"Think we can get it to go overboard?" Sam yelled. Dean shrugged and dug into his hip pocket for more soybeans.
"It's worth a try."
They moved forward together, only to find themselves staring at an empty deck as the Oni disappeared again. A low growl and a scrape of claws against metal was all the warning they got when it reappeared behind them. Sam whirled around, raised his arm to throw, and had to hit the deck and roll to avoid a vicious sweep of the Oni's club. He came up on his knees, heard Dean yell his name somewhere nearby, and moved automatically in the direction of the sound only to get smacked down again as something heavy landed on his back. He tried to throw it off, failed, felt clawed fingers clawing at his hair and wrenching his head back.
The first impact of his forehead against the deck made his vision explode into scattered specks of white light. The second one made everything go black.
Sam woke up to blurred vision, ringing ears, and a headache that threatened to split his skull right down the middle. It took him a few minutes to resolve his surroundings into anything other than random blobs of color. He was lying on a cot in what looked like a very small, very dimly lit hospital room. There was a low, steady humming sound in the background, and at first Sam took it as yet another symptom of whatever was going on in his head. Then he remembered -- it was engine noise. Ship's engine. He was on a ship, and this was probably the infirmary, and he was in the infirmary because-- oh, shit.
"Dean?" Sam raised his head from the pillow and immediately wished he hadn't as his stomach contents made a sudden break for freedom. He swung his legs off the cot with a groan and barely made it in time to vomit into the sink on the opposite side of the room.
There were footsteps behind him, then hands cradling his head and brushing his hair out of the way. Even in his current concussed and miserable state, Sam knew that the hands were not Dean's. He brushed them off, wiped his mouth with the edge of his sleeve and turned around to see who it was.
"Claire? What happened? Where's Dean?"
"You shouldn't be moving around, Sam. You have a concussion."
"I know." Sam slowly climbed to his feet, ignoring Claire's attempts to steady him. "I've had concussions before, this one's not so bad. Where's Dean?"
"Sam--"
"He's all right, isn't he? I heard him yell before I got knocked out. Is he hurt? Did he get the Oni?"
"Sam--"
"Does he know I'm awake? You have to tell him, or he'll worry."
"Sam." Claire cupped her hands around Sam's elbows and steered him back to the cot. He tried to pull away, but his head still hurt and his legs were wobbly, and maybe it wasn't such a bad idea to sit down for just a little while. Maybe he could go sit with Dean. That would be good.
"Where's Dean, Claire?"
"Sam, I'm so sorry."
The words, and the tone they were spoken in, were like a cold finger down Sam's spine. He gripped the edge of the cot with white-knuckled hands and forced himself to keep breathing.
"Sorry for what? Where is he?"
"The crew's been searching the ship for the past two hours. Dean is not on board."
Chapter 6