Troubled Waters, Part 5
Rating: PG, Gen
Summary: In northwestern Washington, Sam and Dean run into a cult, missing people, plagues, some really humid weather, and possessed trees.
Disclaimer: Not being delusional, I don’t own anything. The geography in this story is fairly accurate; everything else is fiction. Oh, and apologies to William Butler Yeats.
Author's Note: As usual, much thanks to
big_pink, who listened to me whine about the troublesome nature of writing a story with an actual plot, and who did a fantastic beta-ing job.
Previous parts
Part Five: Sunday, July 9, morning
My atoms, moreover, are arranged to make me constitutionally inclined to believe that where there’s smoke there’s usually strawberry Jello, seldom fire.
-J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction
xxxxx
There was no air conditioning at the motel, because this part of the world so rarely needed it. There was a large, clunky electric fan and furnace combination that sat beneath the window; Sam had turned the fan on Friday evening when they’d arrived, but it had yet to displace the room’s stuffy air. In fact, Dean had become convinced that the fan expended more energy making noise than blowing air. He had stayed at motels where the breeze created by the lowest setting could be felt at the far wall. He would have given his left arm for such a fan now.
Sleep was elusive. Blankets and sweaty sheets were kicked to the floor, and even with the window wide open, the air felt used. Recycled. Like it was the same air that guests had been breathing in May. And so the brothers rose early, and ate breakfast at the diner across the street before heading over to the Kelman property again, and Dean forwent coffee because he could not conceive of consuming a hot beverage even at seven this morning.
The diner had been fairly empty, but what conversation there was was dominated by the outrageous weather. Not the temperature, although it was considerable, so much as the still air and the humidity. It was an island. It was nothing but coast. There had always been a breeze off the water, drawing away the moist air. Sequim, Fort Townsend, Mukilteo-towns off the island-were experiencing, of course, the heat wave, but there it was mitigated some by the ever-present wind. On Whidbey, they were not so lucky.
On the telephone on Thursday, Sam had asked Anne Edwards to e-mail him a recent photograph of Celia. She had scanned and sent them a studio portrait of an oval-faced girl, with brown eyes and long brown hair, smiling widely and revealing teeth that would have made an orthodontist proud; a strip of four tiny photos, from a curtained booth in a mall, of two girls mugging for the camera, labeled as Celia and her sister, in case they cared; a candid of Celia wearing red- and white-striped pajamas and opening a gift (“Christmas 2005 at my mother’s in Edmonton”); a photo of Celia holding a small, fluffy, white dog, whom Dean thought resembled an angora cat sooner than anything canine; and a picture at a black-tie event of “Celia and her boyfriend, David Huang”, on the off-chance that they would recognize the name.
The girl from the many and varied photographs was currently hanging laundry up to dry on the clothesline in the yard of the Kelman property, although Dean was fairly sure it was an exercise in futility; in the damp, heavy air, the clothes would probably end up wetter than they’d started.
He turned his attention to the house. This time, the welcoming party hadn’t greeted them, since the Winchesters had walked in silently, leaving the car up by the highway, and neither of the two women outside had noticed them yet. He strolled up to the back patio and cleared his throat.
Celia and the other woman, who was watering the garden, started in surprise. “Hello, ladies,” said Dean, smiling his most charming smile. “My name is Dean and this is my brother, Sam, and-Celia?-we happen to know your mother.”
Nothing like putting people at ease, thought Sam, and quickly interjected, “We’ve only spoken on the phone, never actually met her, but she asked us to look for you.” And realized he’d just made things a hundred times worse. “She’s worried about you,” he added, an instant before the woman with the hose screamed.
“Help! Help!”
Help? thought Dean. Overreacting much? It wasn’t like they were actually doing anything.
“No, no, it’s okay,” said Sam, doing his best to look sweet and innocent and entirely incapable of harming a fly. “We just want to talk to you. Make sure you’re okay.” His puppy-dog eyes didn’t appear to be having any effect on the screaming woman, however, and at any rate, it was too late. Half a dozen men burst from the house, weapons drawn.
Sam cut his eyes towards Dean, who had raised both hands in surrender. “Whoa,” he said. “Calm down. We don’t mean anything. Just wanted to have a friendly conversation with Celia here.” Celia, in fact, seemed to be the only one in the entire crowd who was unaffected by the brothers’ sudden appearance. She stared, somewhat disbelievingly, at each Winchester in turn.
“It is you, again,” said a sharp voice, and Dean recognized it as belonging to the blond man they’d met the previous day. Jasper Kelman? “You will not return,” he announced. “If you do, you will be shot on sight. You have been sufficiently warned, and this is private property. Escort them to the road, men,” he ordered.
“We’re leaving, we’re leaving, calm down a little,” said Dean, and began backing again. He didn’t turn his back until he and Sam had gone far enough up the driveway that the house was obscured. “So that was productive,” he remarked.
“Quite,” Sam agreed dryly. “Been a while since a human...” There was a silence as they both remembered their time in Hibbing, Minnesota, in which Sam had been kidnapped by, of all things, people.
Dean cleared his throat as if it would clear the air. He sounded a bit too casual as he said to Sam, “Next stop, Pass Island.”
xxxxx
They listened to the radio as they drove, and this time they got the marine forecast. Finally, this afternoon, there were to be thundershowers. Dean, usually not so much of a fan of rain, was thrilled. “Get rid of some of this heat,” he muttered.
“And there’ll be wind,” reveled Sam, as the meteorologist waxed rhapsodic about gusts of fifty knots out of the southeast or northwest, or something. For the entire area, not just everything-but-Whidbey-Island.
Dean heard the fifty knots, and though of course it was nautical miles, as always when he heard knots he remembered the first time he was on the coast, when he was six years old and in the midst of learning to tie shoelaces, and a big part of his life back then was untying knots… and it wasn’t so different now.
They had missing people, at least one of whom apparently hadn’t willingly joined the cult. They had inexplicable power outages. They had plagues. They had murdered cows. They had the defacement of a tree. And they had no wind. How were all these things tied together?
Dean parked in the lot that now felt as familiar as the heat. He cast an appraising eye at the tourists milling about, and carefully packed two handguns loaded with rock salt into a small backpack, along with a vial of holy water, a box of salt, the EMF meter, and a small spade. He would have preferred to have tucked a gun into the back of his jeans, but he could not plausibly wear a coat to hide it, not in this weather.
Sam reached over and removed the EMF meter. “Don’t bother,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t use it in the midst of dozens of people, Dean! If it wails? It’ll attract all kinds of unwanted attention. Why the hell do we have an EMF meter that makes noise?”
Dean gaped at his brother, wondering where the sudden rage had come from. Well, not rage exactly. More like profound annoyance. Or perhaps deep frustration. He didn’t answer-had nothing to say. Except, childishly:
“You’re the one who’s yelling in a public area.”
Sam rolled his eyes so hard that, for an instant, Dean thought they would keep going on and out his ears.
They didn’t, and instead fixed his older brother in a fierce glare. “You’re the one who keeps bringing up my going away to school.”
It took Dean a moment to realize that Sam was referring, albeit circuitously, to Dean’s comment about the West Coast and its crazies. “You’re still thinking about that? I said that yesterday.”
“You’re still thinking about that?” parroted Sam. “It happened four years ago.”
“It happened? You left, Sam!” Despite his admonishment of Sam, it was Dean’s voice that was rising, and he could feel the uncomfortable glances of passers-by. He didn’t care, although they didn’t usually air their dirty laundry in public. Actually, they didn’t usually air their dirty laundry, period. And what had sparked this, again?
Sam took a deep breath. This was a pointless, roundabout, indirect argument if there ever was one. And he’d sort of started it. It was the heat, he rationalized, and knew he was rationalizing, the heat and humidity that made people act crazy. “And I won’t again, Dean, not yet, not for a long while. Okay? Can we… just, you know, relax? Get on with this?”
It was possibly the first time ever that Sam had declined to talk about something, but Dean was relieved. The air was palpable enough without any tension between himself and Sam. “Truce,” nodded Dean. He jerked his head towards the bridge. “Let’s hit the road.”
xxxxx
“I’m gonna get heatstroke,” complained Dean. It was the first that either of them had spoken since the car. They were standing in front of the defaced arbutus tree, which didn’t appear overly defaced. Since the red-brick bark of the tree shed on its own, it was hard to tell what had peeled naturally and what had been peeled by man.
“If you’d wear shorts like a normal person, it wouldn’t be so bad,” said Sam, trying very hard to keep his tone light.
“Normal?” repeated Dean.
“Oh, forget it,” sighed Sam. “Got the spade?”
Dean pulled it from his bag, knelt, and began scraping away leaves and loose soil from the base of the tree, utterly oblivious to the curious stares of the traveling public. “Necklace broke,” Sam explained helpfully, “pieces scattered all over. Family heirloom,” he added, and the tourists nodded dubiously.
When one offered to help search, Dean could only imagine Sam gesturing wildly with both hands as he heard the rambling refusal.
“Sam?”
“Yeah?” After a quick check to make sure the coast was clear, Sam crouched down beside his brother. “What’s that?”
“Got me.” Dean had excavated a block of wood about the size of a pencil box. The earth around it seemed greyer and finer than the topsoil.
“Ashes,” said Dean, and pinched a bit and rubbed it between his fingers. He lifted the piece of wood and realized it was a box. He pulled off the lid and frowned at the contents. “What the hell?”
Abruptly, Sam recalled that they were in a public place, not the most appropriate location for either an archaeological dig or the exploration of a paranormal object. Pandora’s Box and all. “Let’s take it back to the car, at least, before a park ranger comes along.”
“Yeah.” Dean packed everything into his bag and kicked his piles of dirt back into the hole. “Let’s go.”
xxxxx
It was frustrating. Jasper Kelman saw the fruits of his labors, and he took what pleasure he could out of it. But the plagues, and the island had seen four of them so far, did not seem to be having the desired effect. The newspapers, admittedly, had a field day each time there was a new one, but they were reported as freaks of nature. Cosmic phenomena.
In fact, the frogs were laughed at by the citizenry. The locusts? Taken in stride. By the time the lice outbreak came around, there were tongue-in-cheek comments about the biblical plagues, but no one took the idea seriously. It angered him that his work was being ignored-and it grew worse. His blood-dimmed waters, the red tide? Although he and his followers were grateful, had thanked the spirit profusely, the public paid it no heed whatsoever. He worried that the spirit would be offended. Would no longer grant him the power to punish the country as he saw fit.
He knew, too, that worry never helped anyone. He would be stoic, he told himself; in fact, he would be optimistic. He would trust. He would not have a crisis of faith. Those, he reminded himself, were for the weak of heart, those who lacked conviction. Mere mortals. Pawns. Jasper Kelman took orders from no man.
xxxxx
“We still haven’t gone and seen all of the families of the missing people,” said Sam half an hour later. They’d inspected the box thoroughly. Its inside surfaces were elaborately etched and stained burgundy with something Sam hoped wasn’t blood. It held a handful of scorched scraps of cloth and three pieces of arbutus bark that looked like cinnamon sticks.
“Right. And you’ll need a library to sort out those drawings,” said Dean. “I’ll drop you off and then go and see the families. Hope we’re done before the storm.”
While the sky overhead was still clear as a bell, and the air steamy, above the horizon gathered menacing, dark clouds, worthy of a volcanic eruption.
“Speaking of families. We should probably call Anne Edwards.”
Dean wrinkled his nose. “Or not,” he said. “I mean, all we can tell her at this point is where Celia is, which she already knows.”
Sam shook his head. “She must be out of her mind with worry.”
“Wouldn’t be any different from normal, then,” said Dean unkindly.
“She’s upset,” allowed Sam, “but I think her daughter’s in real trouble anyway!”
Dean sighed. “You want to call, you call.”
There was a pregnant pause, and Sam, without looking at Dean, said, “Maybe I’ll wait till tonight.”
xxxxx
The library had been a nice thought, until they’d arrived in Oak Harbor and discovered it wasn’t open on Sundays in the summer. It had left Dean muttering, again, about backwoods towns, but Sam had shrugged, undeterred, and said he’d find an Internet café to hang out in until Dean returned.
“I’ll probably be awhile,” warned Dean. “It’ll be an hour of driving, and talking to three people…”
“I’m sure I find something to do, Dean; I’m a grown man. I can amuse myself,” said Sam, rolling his eyes.
“I bet you can,” smirked Dean, and Sam swatted him on the arm, but lightly, because they were driving.
They stopped at a café long enough for Dean to scribble down driving directions off the Internet, and then he left, off to Coupeville, Cornet Bay, and Anacortes.
Sam sipped a latte and poked around on Google, searching for an explanation behind the symbols in the box. The staining on the wood made it difficult to see all the lines etched in the wood-burnt into the wood?-but Sam could make out concentric circles and vague triangular shapes. He got nowhere, until he began brainstorming other possibilities of what the lines were. Could be spirals, not concentric circles. Could be swirls, like smoke. Would tie in with the scorched fabric. Could be scribbles, he thought wryly, and I’m just wasting my time.
Finally, when he typed in gyre-he’d been reduced to typing in synonyms for circle and spiral and swirl-he figured it out. He could blame, of all things, literature for the cult. Turned out, William Butler Yeats had been into weird spiritual things. He’d written a somewhat apocalyptic poem in which he described his beliefs, which included human history falling into two-thousand-year cycles. It had been nearly a century ago that he’d written it, and the end of the cycle, he thought, was the Russian Revolution. The symbols in the box were interlocking conical spirals, which apparently represented the patterns and phases of life.
It didn’t quite make sense, but Sam was used to that with the supernatural. Dean had said more than once that it was demons he got, and people were crazy, but Sam disagreed. It was all a matter of knowing what drove people. Figure out which base desires-and humanity was savage at heart-were motivating a person, and you know what he’ll do. Demons, on the other hand, thought Sam, were a whole ‘nother ball of wax.
Take Jasper Kelman, for example. Cultic leaders were power-hungry, essentially. Charismatic, sociopathic. Sometimes idealistic. So he wanted more followers, so he did something drastic. What, exactly, Sam didn’t know, but he’d figure it out eventually. Somehow his spiral box was-
And Sam realized that he didn’t actually have any proof that Jasper Kelman was at fault for any of it.
The EMF meter hadn’t reacted at the house. It had reacted, but mildly, by the fire pit. Could have been residual noise from sacrificing the cow, or whatever they’d done.
The power outages, the missing people? It was anybody’s guess.
xxxxx
Dean had had about enough of strange people. First, there was Jasper Kelman and cohorts. Then there was that baby at Evelyn Brady’s, and then one of the mothers he talked to insisted on riding her exercise bicycle throughout the conversation (he’d arrived mid-workout), and another family wouldn’t speak to him at all, and the last mother had decorated her house entirely in pink. It was unnatural.
None of the missing women had been particularly mentally or emotionally unstable prior to their disappearances, which would seem to disprove the idea of their having willingly joined a cult. And aside from their being women of similar ages-they ranged between twenty and twenty-seven years old-there was only one other commonality between them. They were all engaged in be married. It had to mean something. He took out his cell phone to call Sam, and groaned when he saw it was off and it wouldn’t turn on. The battery was dead. He supposed it was to be expected-he couldn’t remember the last time he’d charged it. Maybe in South Dakota?
So he went the old-fashioned route and ponied up thirty-five cents to a pay phone. He dialed Sam’s number, but the phone just rang and rang.
xxxxx
Sam had been getting antsy for a while; all this uncertainty about whether Jasper Kelman was to blame for anything at all was itching at him. And it might have been the closeness of the heavens, too: the sun had been blotted out by thick clouds, making dusk come hours early, and the air felt electric, overripe, this close to combusting.
The radio in the coffee shop was playing soft jazz out of Seattle, though the music stopped for the eleven o’clock news. Sam half-listened until he heard fishing boat missing and home port of Oak Harbor. And then the entire café quieted, and the barista turned up the volume. When the announcer had moved on to international news, the clientele began speaking in hushed voices.
“Three missing people, this time.”
“Hasn’t been a boat before.”
“Poor woman, her husband and brother and daughter all missing!”
“Why, I can’t recall the last time a boat went down in calm waters…”
And Sam was sure it was related to the other missing people.
Summary: In northwestern Washington, Sam and Dean run into a cult, missing people, plagues, some really humid weather, and possessed trees.
Disclaimer: Not being delusional, I don’t own anything. The geography in this story is fairly accurate; everything else is fiction. Oh, and apologies to William Butler Yeats.
Author's Note: As usual, much thanks to
big_pink, who listened to me whine about the troublesome nature of writing a story with an actual plot, and who did a fantastic beta-ing job.
Previous parts
Part Five: Sunday, July 9, morning
My atoms, moreover, are arranged to make me constitutionally inclined to believe that where there’s smoke there’s usually strawberry Jello, seldom fire.
-J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction
xxxxx
There was no air conditioning at the motel, because this part of the world so rarely needed it. There was a large, clunky electric fan and furnace combination that sat beneath the window; Sam had turned the fan on Friday evening when they’d arrived, but it had yet to displace the room’s stuffy air. In fact, Dean had become convinced that the fan expended more energy making noise than blowing air. He had stayed at motels where the breeze created by the lowest setting could be felt at the far wall. He would have given his left arm for such a fan now.
Sleep was elusive. Blankets and sweaty sheets were kicked to the floor, and even with the window wide open, the air felt used. Recycled. Like it was the same air that guests had been breathing in May. And so the brothers rose early, and ate breakfast at the diner across the street before heading over to the Kelman property again, and Dean forwent coffee because he could not conceive of consuming a hot beverage even at seven this morning.
The diner had been fairly empty, but what conversation there was was dominated by the outrageous weather. Not the temperature, although it was considerable, so much as the still air and the humidity. It was an island. It was nothing but coast. There had always been a breeze off the water, drawing away the moist air. Sequim, Fort Townsend, Mukilteo-towns off the island-were experiencing, of course, the heat wave, but there it was mitigated some by the ever-present wind. On Whidbey, they were not so lucky.
On the telephone on Thursday, Sam had asked Anne Edwards to e-mail him a recent photograph of Celia. She had scanned and sent them a studio portrait of an oval-faced girl, with brown eyes and long brown hair, smiling widely and revealing teeth that would have made an orthodontist proud; a strip of four tiny photos, from a curtained booth in a mall, of two girls mugging for the camera, labeled as Celia and her sister, in case they cared; a candid of Celia wearing red- and white-striped pajamas and opening a gift (“Christmas 2005 at my mother’s in Edmonton”); a photo of Celia holding a small, fluffy, white dog, whom Dean thought resembled an angora cat sooner than anything canine; and a picture at a black-tie event of “Celia and her boyfriend, David Huang”, on the off-chance that they would recognize the name.
The girl from the many and varied photographs was currently hanging laundry up to dry on the clothesline in the yard of the Kelman property, although Dean was fairly sure it was an exercise in futility; in the damp, heavy air, the clothes would probably end up wetter than they’d started.
He turned his attention to the house. This time, the welcoming party hadn’t greeted them, since the Winchesters had walked in silently, leaving the car up by the highway, and neither of the two women outside had noticed them yet. He strolled up to the back patio and cleared his throat.
Celia and the other woman, who was watering the garden, started in surprise. “Hello, ladies,” said Dean, smiling his most charming smile. “My name is Dean and this is my brother, Sam, and-Celia?-we happen to know your mother.”
Nothing like putting people at ease, thought Sam, and quickly interjected, “We’ve only spoken on the phone, never actually met her, but she asked us to look for you.” And realized he’d just made things a hundred times worse. “She’s worried about you,” he added, an instant before the woman with the hose screamed.
“Help! Help!”
Help? thought Dean. Overreacting much? It wasn’t like they were actually doing anything.
“No, no, it’s okay,” said Sam, doing his best to look sweet and innocent and entirely incapable of harming a fly. “We just want to talk to you. Make sure you’re okay.” His puppy-dog eyes didn’t appear to be having any effect on the screaming woman, however, and at any rate, it was too late. Half a dozen men burst from the house, weapons drawn.
Sam cut his eyes towards Dean, who had raised both hands in surrender. “Whoa,” he said. “Calm down. We don’t mean anything. Just wanted to have a friendly conversation with Celia here.” Celia, in fact, seemed to be the only one in the entire crowd who was unaffected by the brothers’ sudden appearance. She stared, somewhat disbelievingly, at each Winchester in turn.
“It is you, again,” said a sharp voice, and Dean recognized it as belonging to the blond man they’d met the previous day. Jasper Kelman? “You will not return,” he announced. “If you do, you will be shot on sight. You have been sufficiently warned, and this is private property. Escort them to the road, men,” he ordered.
“We’re leaving, we’re leaving, calm down a little,” said Dean, and began backing again. He didn’t turn his back until he and Sam had gone far enough up the driveway that the house was obscured. “So that was productive,” he remarked.
“Quite,” Sam agreed dryly. “Been a while since a human...” There was a silence as they both remembered their time in Hibbing, Minnesota, in which Sam had been kidnapped by, of all things, people.
Dean cleared his throat as if it would clear the air. He sounded a bit too casual as he said to Sam, “Next stop, Pass Island.”
xxxxx
They listened to the radio as they drove, and this time they got the marine forecast. Finally, this afternoon, there were to be thundershowers. Dean, usually not so much of a fan of rain, was thrilled. “Get rid of some of this heat,” he muttered.
“And there’ll be wind,” reveled Sam, as the meteorologist waxed rhapsodic about gusts of fifty knots out of the southeast or northwest, or something. For the entire area, not just everything-but-Whidbey-Island.
Dean heard the fifty knots, and though of course it was nautical miles, as always when he heard knots he remembered the first time he was on the coast, when he was six years old and in the midst of learning to tie shoelaces, and a big part of his life back then was untying knots… and it wasn’t so different now.
They had missing people, at least one of whom apparently hadn’t willingly joined the cult. They had inexplicable power outages. They had plagues. They had murdered cows. They had the defacement of a tree. And they had no wind. How were all these things tied together?
Dean parked in the lot that now felt as familiar as the heat. He cast an appraising eye at the tourists milling about, and carefully packed two handguns loaded with rock salt into a small backpack, along with a vial of holy water, a box of salt, the EMF meter, and a small spade. He would have preferred to have tucked a gun into the back of his jeans, but he could not plausibly wear a coat to hide it, not in this weather.
Sam reached over and removed the EMF meter. “Don’t bother,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t use it in the midst of dozens of people, Dean! If it wails? It’ll attract all kinds of unwanted attention. Why the hell do we have an EMF meter that makes noise?”
Dean gaped at his brother, wondering where the sudden rage had come from. Well, not rage exactly. More like profound annoyance. Or perhaps deep frustration. He didn’t answer-had nothing to say. Except, childishly:
“You’re the one who’s yelling in a public area.”
Sam rolled his eyes so hard that, for an instant, Dean thought they would keep going on and out his ears.
They didn’t, and instead fixed his older brother in a fierce glare. “You’re the one who keeps bringing up my going away to school.”
It took Dean a moment to realize that Sam was referring, albeit circuitously, to Dean’s comment about the West Coast and its crazies. “You’re still thinking about that? I said that yesterday.”
“You’re still thinking about that?” parroted Sam. “It happened four years ago.”
“It happened? You left, Sam!” Despite his admonishment of Sam, it was Dean’s voice that was rising, and he could feel the uncomfortable glances of passers-by. He didn’t care, although they didn’t usually air their dirty laundry in public. Actually, they didn’t usually air their dirty laundry, period. And what had sparked this, again?
Sam took a deep breath. This was a pointless, roundabout, indirect argument if there ever was one. And he’d sort of started it. It was the heat, he rationalized, and knew he was rationalizing, the heat and humidity that made people act crazy. “And I won’t again, Dean, not yet, not for a long while. Okay? Can we… just, you know, relax? Get on with this?”
It was possibly the first time ever that Sam had declined to talk about something, but Dean was relieved. The air was palpable enough without any tension between himself and Sam. “Truce,” nodded Dean. He jerked his head towards the bridge. “Let’s hit the road.”
xxxxx
“I’m gonna get heatstroke,” complained Dean. It was the first that either of them had spoken since the car. They were standing in front of the defaced arbutus tree, which didn’t appear overly defaced. Since the red-brick bark of the tree shed on its own, it was hard to tell what had peeled naturally and what had been peeled by man.
“If you’d wear shorts like a normal person, it wouldn’t be so bad,” said Sam, trying very hard to keep his tone light.
“Normal?” repeated Dean.
“Oh, forget it,” sighed Sam. “Got the spade?”
Dean pulled it from his bag, knelt, and began scraping away leaves and loose soil from the base of the tree, utterly oblivious to the curious stares of the traveling public. “Necklace broke,” Sam explained helpfully, “pieces scattered all over. Family heirloom,” he added, and the tourists nodded dubiously.
When one offered to help search, Dean could only imagine Sam gesturing wildly with both hands as he heard the rambling refusal.
“Sam?”
“Yeah?” After a quick check to make sure the coast was clear, Sam crouched down beside his brother. “What’s that?”
“Got me.” Dean had excavated a block of wood about the size of a pencil box. The earth around it seemed greyer and finer than the topsoil.
“Ashes,” said Dean, and pinched a bit and rubbed it between his fingers. He lifted the piece of wood and realized it was a box. He pulled off the lid and frowned at the contents. “What the hell?”
Abruptly, Sam recalled that they were in a public place, not the most appropriate location for either an archaeological dig or the exploration of a paranormal object. Pandora’s Box and all. “Let’s take it back to the car, at least, before a park ranger comes along.”
“Yeah.” Dean packed everything into his bag and kicked his piles of dirt back into the hole. “Let’s go.”
xxxxx
It was frustrating. Jasper Kelman saw the fruits of his labors, and he took what pleasure he could out of it. But the plagues, and the island had seen four of them so far, did not seem to be having the desired effect. The newspapers, admittedly, had a field day each time there was a new one, but they were reported as freaks of nature. Cosmic phenomena.
In fact, the frogs were laughed at by the citizenry. The locusts? Taken in stride. By the time the lice outbreak came around, there were tongue-in-cheek comments about the biblical plagues, but no one took the idea seriously. It angered him that his work was being ignored-and it grew worse. His blood-dimmed waters, the red tide? Although he and his followers were grateful, had thanked the spirit profusely, the public paid it no heed whatsoever. He worried that the spirit would be offended. Would no longer grant him the power to punish the country as he saw fit.
He knew, too, that worry never helped anyone. He would be stoic, he told himself; in fact, he would be optimistic. He would trust. He would not have a crisis of faith. Those, he reminded himself, were for the weak of heart, those who lacked conviction. Mere mortals. Pawns. Jasper Kelman took orders from no man.
xxxxx
“We still haven’t gone and seen all of the families of the missing people,” said Sam half an hour later. They’d inspected the box thoroughly. Its inside surfaces were elaborately etched and stained burgundy with something Sam hoped wasn’t blood. It held a handful of scorched scraps of cloth and three pieces of arbutus bark that looked like cinnamon sticks.
“Right. And you’ll need a library to sort out those drawings,” said Dean. “I’ll drop you off and then go and see the families. Hope we’re done before the storm.”
While the sky overhead was still clear as a bell, and the air steamy, above the horizon gathered menacing, dark clouds, worthy of a volcanic eruption.
“Speaking of families. We should probably call Anne Edwards.”
Dean wrinkled his nose. “Or not,” he said. “I mean, all we can tell her at this point is where Celia is, which she already knows.”
Sam shook his head. “She must be out of her mind with worry.”
“Wouldn’t be any different from normal, then,” said Dean unkindly.
“She’s upset,” allowed Sam, “but I think her daughter’s in real trouble anyway!”
Dean sighed. “You want to call, you call.”
There was a pregnant pause, and Sam, without looking at Dean, said, “Maybe I’ll wait till tonight.”
xxxxx
The library had been a nice thought, until they’d arrived in Oak Harbor and discovered it wasn’t open on Sundays in the summer. It had left Dean muttering, again, about backwoods towns, but Sam had shrugged, undeterred, and said he’d find an Internet café to hang out in until Dean returned.
“I’ll probably be awhile,” warned Dean. “It’ll be an hour of driving, and talking to three people…”
“I’m sure I find something to do, Dean; I’m a grown man. I can amuse myself,” said Sam, rolling his eyes.
“I bet you can,” smirked Dean, and Sam swatted him on the arm, but lightly, because they were driving.
They stopped at a café long enough for Dean to scribble down driving directions off the Internet, and then he left, off to Coupeville, Cornet Bay, and Anacortes.
Sam sipped a latte and poked around on Google, searching for an explanation behind the symbols in the box. The staining on the wood made it difficult to see all the lines etched in the wood-burnt into the wood?-but Sam could make out concentric circles and vague triangular shapes. He got nowhere, until he began brainstorming other possibilities of what the lines were. Could be spirals, not concentric circles. Could be swirls, like smoke. Would tie in with the scorched fabric. Could be scribbles, he thought wryly, and I’m just wasting my time.
Finally, when he typed in gyre-he’d been reduced to typing in synonyms for circle and spiral and swirl-he figured it out. He could blame, of all things, literature for the cult. Turned out, William Butler Yeats had been into weird spiritual things. He’d written a somewhat apocalyptic poem in which he described his beliefs, which included human history falling into two-thousand-year cycles. It had been nearly a century ago that he’d written it, and the end of the cycle, he thought, was the Russian Revolution. The symbols in the box were interlocking conical spirals, which apparently represented the patterns and phases of life.
It didn’t quite make sense, but Sam was used to that with the supernatural. Dean had said more than once that it was demons he got, and people were crazy, but Sam disagreed. It was all a matter of knowing what drove people. Figure out which base desires-and humanity was savage at heart-were motivating a person, and you know what he’ll do. Demons, on the other hand, thought Sam, were a whole ‘nother ball of wax.
Take Jasper Kelman, for example. Cultic leaders were power-hungry, essentially. Charismatic, sociopathic. Sometimes idealistic. So he wanted more followers, so he did something drastic. What, exactly, Sam didn’t know, but he’d figure it out eventually. Somehow his spiral box was-
And Sam realized that he didn’t actually have any proof that Jasper Kelman was at fault for any of it.
The EMF meter hadn’t reacted at the house. It had reacted, but mildly, by the fire pit. Could have been residual noise from sacrificing the cow, or whatever they’d done.
The power outages, the missing people? It was anybody’s guess.
xxxxx
Dean had had about enough of strange people. First, there was Jasper Kelman and cohorts. Then there was that baby at Evelyn Brady’s, and then one of the mothers he talked to insisted on riding her exercise bicycle throughout the conversation (he’d arrived mid-workout), and another family wouldn’t speak to him at all, and the last mother had decorated her house entirely in pink. It was unnatural.
None of the missing women had been particularly mentally or emotionally unstable prior to their disappearances, which would seem to disprove the idea of their having willingly joined a cult. And aside from their being women of similar ages-they ranged between twenty and twenty-seven years old-there was only one other commonality between them. They were all engaged in be married. It had to mean something. He took out his cell phone to call Sam, and groaned when he saw it was off and it wouldn’t turn on. The battery was dead. He supposed it was to be expected-he couldn’t remember the last time he’d charged it. Maybe in South Dakota?
So he went the old-fashioned route and ponied up thirty-five cents to a pay phone. He dialed Sam’s number, but the phone just rang and rang.
xxxxx
Sam had been getting antsy for a while; all this uncertainty about whether Jasper Kelman was to blame for anything at all was itching at him. And it might have been the closeness of the heavens, too: the sun had been blotted out by thick clouds, making dusk come hours early, and the air felt electric, overripe, this close to combusting.
The radio in the coffee shop was playing soft jazz out of Seattle, though the music stopped for the eleven o’clock news. Sam half-listened until he heard fishing boat missing and home port of Oak Harbor. And then the entire café quieted, and the barista turned up the volume. When the announcer had moved on to international news, the clientele began speaking in hushed voices.
“Three missing people, this time.”
“Hasn’t been a boat before.”
“Poor woman, her husband and brother and daughter all missing!”
“Why, I can’t recall the last time a boat went down in calm waters…”
And Sam was sure it was related to the other missing people.