A Life Most Ordinary, Interlude One
Interlude 1: Mary & John
The memories come back to haunt me, they haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a wish that don’t come true, or is it something worse?
The River - Bruce Springsteen
Back to Chapter One
Mary Winchester was the seventh and final victim of Jon Finch, the Midwestern serial killer known as The Yellow-Eyed Demon. She was drugged, tortured and strangled in her home on the evening of November 2nd, 1983 while her husband, John, was forced to watch, paralyzed by a drug administered by Finch while the couple slept. The couple’s two sons, Dean, 4, and Sammy, 6 months, were in the house at the time, and slept through most of their parents’ ordeal, though the actions of Dean in escaping the house with his baby brother did lead to Finch’s eventual capture and incarceration.
Sam knew the entire Wikipedia entry by heart, he’d read all the newspaper reports, seen the news clippings; the photographs from the crime scene were embedded in his memory more solidly than the Pledge of Allegiance. After all, the life and crimes of the self-styled Yellow-Eyed Demon, real name: Jon Finch, were the main discussion topic for his Criminology class during his second year of college. He could still remember how Professor Gregory asked him to stay behind after his first class, his middle-aged face flushed with embarrassment and his words a torrent of awkward apologies.
“I’m so sorry; I didn’t realize until I read the attendance list and saw your name. But it’s got to be, there can’t be many other Samuel Winchesters of the correct age in this state -“
He interrupted him at that point to the guy’s immense relief, shrugging coolly. “You don’t need to apologize, Professor, you’re hardly the first person to make the connection.”
And that was most definitely the truth. Both he and Dean had been accorded a macabre notoriety over the years, their mother’s death and the circumstances around it being such a pop culture standby. It had even been made into a Lifetime movie, though Dean had never seen it and Sam only once, one night after a lot of pot and Dutch courage, and it had been too laughably bad to take seriously.
“Well, uh, I’ve been thinking about changing the syllabus for several years,” the Professor continued, his eyes locked on some point to the left of Sam’s shoulder, “we could do with some fresh case studies to work on, and thanks to the internet, everybody already knows the story.”
“Don’t go altering your syllabus on my account,” he said sharply, “I knew what was on it before I signed up for the class. I knew I’d have to study this - uh, my mom’s case.”
The professor’s mouth opened and closed a few times while his fingers played with the papers he was haphazardly stuffing into his briefcase. “I’m not sure about the ethics surrounding this, we - what I mean to say is - normally, there is a lot of discussion around the night of Finch’s capture, which of course is also the night that your mother -” he broke off for a moment, unable to finish the sentence.
He reassured Professor Gregory that he had no intention of being treated any differently from any other of the students just because of who he was, and in the end, he reluctantly agreed to go ahead with the class as he always had.
His old boyfriend, David, called him crazy when Sam explained what they were studying in Criminology 204, and that he had no intention of ditching the class. As for Dean, well, Sam never told Dean about any of it, and he swore David to secrecy, not that David and Dean were ever in the habit of exchanging secrets with each other. But he knew that in Dean’s eyes, having anything to do with the case - with him - Finch - would be seen as unforgivable, a betrayal of their mom’s memory and their family history.
Dean rarely spoke about Mom. Sure, they’d do their annual pilgrimage up to Lawrence on the anniversary of Dad’s death, leaving the boys with Jess for the day. They’d lay tulips (Mom’s favorite flowers) over her grave, the spot where they’d scattered their father’s ashes years earlier, and they’d talk about their parents; Dean dredging up the painful, childish memories he had of Mom, and Sam searching his own memory for the scant good memories he had of Dad. This was the only time Dean would willingly talk about Mom, and Sam would listen hard, soaking up every little detail Dean ever shared like he’d stored up the boxes of candy he’d gotten at Christmas, knowing it would be months before he’d ever taste anything that good again.
Sam had no memories of his mother. She’d never been a real, flesh and blood person to him as she was to Dean or Dad. She was an image, a symbol of everything that had gone wrong with their lives, of everything they’d had taken away from them, and sometimes, deep down, there was a part of him that resented her for it, for being the person that Finch chose, his most celebrated victim, the Sharon Tate of Lawrence, Kansas.
All of Finch’s victims were like Mom: young, attractive, suburban moms with young children. He’d being working as a tech at the office of Dr Connell, Sam’s pediatrician, in Lawrence when Mary Winchester came to his attention. He’d already killed six times before her: murders that were spread out over the Midwestern states over a period of twelve years, two women in Ohio, one in Indiana, one in Illinois, and two in Kansas, careful, premeditated murders that hadn’t even been linked until after Mom’s death, after he confessed in custody. He was smart, cunning, detailed and meticulous in his planning. Once he fixated on his chosen victim, he found out every scrap of information he could about her, gathering and hoarding it for months.
Finch first came across Mom when she brought baby Sammy to Dr Connell’s for his new-born inoculations. He noticed her and became entranced, waiting over five months before he acted on the night of Sam’s six-month birthday, and by that time, the store of information he had on Mom, on all four Winchesters, was staggering. The cops had found it all after he’d been captured: long-range photos of all four of them, all of Sam and Dean’s medical records copied from the doctor’s office, utility bills and other pieces of mail he’d stolen over the course of his five-month obsession. It was like a real-life version of Thomas Harris’Red Dragon, except this psycho wasn’t obsessed with William Blake, but with biblical demonology, with possession and devils and demons, with capturing and devouring what he saw as these perfect examples of motherhood, the pictures of biblical demons and angels, the occult symbols and satanic sigils vying for space on the walls of his apartment with the stolen pictures of Mary Winchester and her family.
Once Finch gained access to their house, he went straight up to their parents’ room and there he injected both Mom and Dad with the paralyzing drugs that kept them immobile but alive and lucid throughout the entire ordeal. He propped Dad up in his marital bed, rearranged his paralyzed, helpless body like he was a life-size puppet, making sure that Dad would have the best view possible of what happened next, making sure that Dad had no other choice than to watch when Finch sliced into his wife’s soft, white skin, when he penetrated and raped her with his strap-on dildo, when he sheared off her beautiful long blond hair and licked over the cuts he’d made in her face, blood dribbling down his chin, the yellow contact lenses he wore to play the part of his demonic alter-ego making his eyes glow like an animal’s, a Francis Bacon portrait in the flesh.
Dean woke up in the middle of the night after a nightmare and found himself in a real-life nightmare a billion times more horrifying than anything his four-year-old mind could’ve dreamed up. Dean crept to their parents’ room, looking for a hug and a kiss and the reassurance of their mother’s loving embrace, but he found something else: a picture that Dean never managed to exorcise from his traumatized memory, the one that still haunted his nightmares: Finch crouching over his mother, yellow-eyes shining eerily and terribly in the half-light, knife glinting just as terribly in his hand, Mom’s blood dripping from the blade, Mom’s dead, staring eyes glued lifelessly open. Finch didn’t notice Dean creep away, too transfixed by his victim, but Dean ran straight to his baby brother’s nursery, grabbed Sammy from his crib and fled from the house and into the night, running straight to the Jennings’ porch next door where he hammered his little fists on the front door until their neighbors woke up.
This last part was public knowledge: a four year old boy bringing down a psychotic killer - there was nothing better than that, and the photo of Dean standing on the front lawn in his pajamas with his baby brother in his arms had made the international press the following day, becoming a staple of True Crime bestsellers ever after.
Being forced to watch his wife’s rape and murder while he lay drugged and powerless had changed their Dad forever. Sam vaguely knew from Dad’s better days and from Bobby’s stories that Dad hadn’t always been how he was. He knew that Dad had been a hero, a marine, a tough sonofabitch who had stared death in the face more than once in his two tours in Vietnam. But the Dad he knew for the rest of his life was a broken man. Of course it didn’t help that it wasn’t just about Dad losing his wife in the most horrific way possible, it was losing his wife in such a public fashion, to police and reporters and TV crews, to members of the public with opinions and aspersions and suspicions. And Dad had no one to comfort him, just two small boys and headlines on every news program. It wasn’t surprising that shit got so bad.
Not long after Mom’s death, he was institutionalized for the first time and Sam and Dean were taken into foster-care. There were no convenient surviving relatives to take them in, all their grandparents being dead and Dad’s one estranged sister living in Canada and unwilling to get involved. There was only Bobby, Dad’s old platoon sergeant and best friend from the marines, and thank God for that because Sam was pretty sure, if it hadn’t been for Bobby then he and Dean would’ve spent all of their childhoods in care, and mostly likely gotten split up at some point. But Bobby came to Dad’s rescue, helped him get a decent lawyer and get his kids back, and after that, he arranged a job for him, a new life on the other side of the state, a new life in the town of Corn.
Sometimes Sam wondered how his life would’ve turned out if Mom had lived, if he and Dean had been raised by two sane and healthy parents. But imagining himself with a mom and a dad was as inconceivable as imagining himself as a straight guy. His childhood shaped the person he was: stubborn, resilient, wary of outsiders and unhealthily attached to his brother, and perhaps he would still be all those things if he’d been raised by two parents, but somehow he doubted it.
He and Dean lost out on a lot, not just a Mom, but the kind of stability most kids take for granted, the knowledge and comfort that your parents would always be there for you. They never had that. Dad was a distant, broken and frequently terrifying figure in Sam’s early life, and in later years, when he was a teenager, a shabby, raving and frequently drunk embarrassment in a bathrobe. Sam never invited friends home, too ashamed of their dirty, threadbare house and rambling, crazy father, and Dean did so rarely, only when he had no other option, over-strict fathers or cold weather driving him and his current girl-of-the-moment back to his own bedroom.
Years later, Sam felt guilty when he remembered his old attitude towards Dad, the shame and contempt he’d felt for the guy who was his (only) parent. It wasn’t as if Dad could help what he was, but as a kid and a teenager that had never registered with him. He’d preferred not to notice when Dad did clean up his act, when he kept a job and a regular paycheck for more than six months, when he remembered their birthdays or turned up to Dean’s football games or complimented Sam on his grades. Oh, yeah, he resented his father when he was a kid. He hated watching Dean put Dad to bed after Dad’d sunk all their money into the bottom of a whisky bottle when he knew, he fucking knew that he wasn’t supposed to mix alcohol with his meds. He hated waking up in the middle of the night and listening to Dad sobbing and weeping and clamoring, shouting out their mother’s name as Dean - ‘cause it was always Dean - tried to calm him down with soothing, soft words, as if Dad were the child and Dean the parent. Afterwards, when Dad was finally asleep, Dean would come into Sam's room, perch on the edge of his bed with huge dry eyes, and reach out to brush Sam's hair from his eyes, murmuring, “It’s okay, Sammy, I'm here, always gonna be here for you.”
Dean made up for Dad.
On to Chapter Two