The Carver (7/8)
Title: The Carver
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Horror
Characters: Dean, Sam
Pairings: none
Disclaimer: I do not own or lay claim to anything related to Supernatural.
Summary: Something is carving people up like jack-o-lanterns. When the boys take a case on Halloween, Dean revisits high school from a new perspective, Sam explores his hatred of the holiday, and they both learn that the past is haunting everyone. Takes place Halloween of S3, after Bedtime Stories.
The Carver
By Spectral Scribe
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Marty had been there for hours, arguing with Linda and listening to her make phone calls as afternoon sank into evening. After all this time trying to figure out what had gone wrong and who the mystery teacher was, they still knew nothing, and he was starting to get restless and irritated. He was a calm, composed man on most occasions, but right then he would have liked nothing better than to shake Linda, who stared at him with vacant eyes and was probably a wino. He was sure he smelled liquor on her breath when she got close, which had only angered him more.
But then a thunder of noise rose up, echoing to the main office, distant and hard to place. It sounded like five hundred people screaming at once, but that didn’t make any sense.
Footsteps pounded down the hallway as two people ran past outside. Marty could tell when the auditorium doors opened because the sound lost its muffler, spilled out clearly into the hallway, footsteps and screams and panicked voices.
“What is going on?” he murmured, stepping to the door of the office and looking out.
Linda appeared at his side, finally having come out from behind her desk. She, too, gazed into the hall.
“I have no idea.”
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The members of the audience had risen from their seats like a unified, amorphous amoeba; some remained where they were, frozen by fear, while others immediately pooled in the aisles and tripped over one another in a scurry to the exit, as if they thought that the appearance of the body was a result of some contagious disease.
Audrey took a stumbling step backwards, her foot sliding on the hem of her long black Lady Macbeth dress, and with a jarring, painful stab on her tailbone, she found herself sitting on the stage, eyes still locked on Messenger #3’s bloody face. Her brain seemed to be unraveling because she thought she saw him transform into Brian, and then into a little kid from the 1800’s, and then back again like overlapping pictures.
The curtains leading backstage rustled, and two tall figures appeared, having run in from the back door. One of them hurried over to her and crouched down.
“Audrey. Audrey, are you okay?”
It was Mr. Robinson. She felt dazed and cut off from reality. What was going on? She thought she should respond. She nodded. Her tongue felt thick in her mouth.
“Dean,” came an unfamiliar voice, and Mr. Robinson glanced away, up at the thing hanging from the ceiling, and then back at her. “Just stay here for a minute, okay?”
Okay, that sounded fine. She could just sit here. The auditorium seemed to be exploding, but that was okay, she was just going to sit here and everything would be fine.
Mr. Robinson was talking to someone; their voices drifted around her like the morphing reality. She felt cold.
“We need to get everybody out of here.” That was Mr. Robinson’s voice.
“They’re trying pretty hard to do that on her own. But they don’t seem to be… hang on.”
Footsteps running off. Everything seemed to be getting more and more distant. Something told Audrey that this was not a good sign, that her brain was trying to get away from the horror hanging in front of her: the horror of finding Brian and seeing those dead children all over school and having Messenger #3 drop down practically on top of her.
“Audrey, you still with me?”
She blinked. Mr. Robinson was in front of her. She felt herself nod.
Footsteps coming back, heavy, vibrating the stage beneath her.
“Uh, bad news. Doors are locked.”
“What, you kiddin’ me? The bitch locked us all in!”
“Yeah, looks like.”
“Damn.” A pause. “We gotta end this. ‘Cause if Miss Carver doesn’t hurt someone, these people are gonna start hurting themselves tryin’ to get out-”
“Dean! Down!”
The other man shouted this just as Audrey felt a scratchy rope loop around her neck and tug. There was the crack of a gunshot somewhere above her head and then she was flying backward, pulled by the rope, sliding along the floor; her legs dragged uselessly, and she instinctively grabbed onto the rope and yanked at it to no avail as it tightened painfully around her throat. The speed picked up, and she was flying along the floor, the stage becoming a blur as she slid into the dark backstage area, then out into a hall, careening faster than should have been possible.
Her numbness was breaking, shoved out of the way by abject terror, and she started kicking and scrabbling at her neck and gasping for breath and screaming because she realized who was behind her, who was pulling her along, and who would kill her. The hallway slipped away as she was wrenched around a corner, and then she was soaring into a classroom, and then the door was slamming shut, and then everything stopped.
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“You missed!” Dean roared, immediately sprinting to the curtain that led backstage, where Audrey had disappeared, Miss Carver grinning and holding the rope around her neck as she vanished and pulled the girl backwards.
Sam, still clutching the gun, followed; Dean could hear his heavy footfalls keeping up just behind him, so he sped up, ran into a door and slammed it open as he tumbled into the dim hallway and caught his balance.
There were two very shocked people standing there. One was a woman with curly blonde hair, her mouth hanging open. The other was a distinguished middle-aged man wearing a sky-blue tie and wide eyes.
“Marty!” Dean cried out as he stumbled to a stop, Sam nearly colliding with his back. His eyes darted around the hall-which way did they go? “Buddy! What are you, what are you doing here?”
“I just… I just… Paul?” The normally eloquent man seemed at a loss for words, brow furrowing, looking utterly baffled.
“Wait a minute,” the woman spoke up, eyes narrowing. “I talked to you on the phone. You’re Marty Robinson!”
“I-what?” Marty stammered.
Dean opened his mouth and found he had nothing to say. He held it open for a moment before speaking slowly and uncertainly, “Yes I am.”
“What-no you’re not!” Marty’s voice shot up in pitch, face reddening, completely flustered.
He had nothing. Dean shook his head. “No I’m not. And I can explain that. But not now. Which way did the redhead go?”
“Wait, if you’re not Marty Robinson,” the woman shouted, “Who is?”
Marty rounded on the-apparently not too bright-woman and shouted, “I’M MARTY ROBINSON, YOU BRAINLESS BUFFOON!”
Dean rolled his eyes. “What he said. Which way?”
Marty, looking dazed and surprised at his own outburst, pointed to his left.
Dean nodded and clapped him on the shoulder. “Nice chat.” Then he took off once again, chasing after Miss Carver and Audrey, aware now of where he was going.
He practically slammed into the wall as he lurched into the empty boys bathroom before spinning around and doubling back, turning the corner, and revolving in a full circle to figure out which classroom would have been where the old schoolhouse was. He was vaguely aware that Sam was no longer behind him, but that didn’t stop him from grabbing onto the handle of the closed door and twisting uselessly.
“Open up, you crazy bitch!” he shouted through the door, pounding on the wood. Stepping back, he drove his foot forward, kicking it twice before the handle turned and the door swung inward to admit him of its own accord.
And he found himself face-to-face with the Carver.
She looked as she had before: graying hair in a tight bun, glasses on the tip of her pointed nose, colors washed out on her old-fashioned brown dress.
Audrey was on the floor behind her, rope lying by her feet, eyes wide.
“We have a new student, class. Say hello to Dean Winchester,” Miss Carver spoke softly, voice deceptively smooth like honey. “Would Dean like to come in?” She canted her head slightly to the left.
“You only kill bad students. Let Audrey go. She’s a good student. I’m her teacher,” Dean spat, realizing the absurdity of reasoning with a ghost.
“Dean would like to learn, class, but I can only teach one student at a time,” she replied with lilting indifference. “Audrey is not a good student. She would rather cheat than fail. She is a liar.” She tilted her head in the other direction. “Like you.”
Damn it, where was Sam with the salt gun?
“Dean is not a very good student.” Miss Carver clicked her tongue and shook her head. “He must learn his lesson.”
Static electricity sparked in the air, and what seemed like a violent wind pushed Audrey along the floor and right out into the hallway. She stared up at Dean, looking dazed, and he only had a moment to register that she was okay before the same force tugged him inside the room and the door slammed shut behind him.
Catching his balance, Dean immediately stepped to the door and grabbed the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. When he turned around, he was no longer in the empty classroom.
He was in her classroom.
He was in the schoolhouse.
Everything about it was old-fashioned, from the wooden desks and the lack of electrical lights, to the expansive blackboard at the front. There were lanterns placed about the room for light.
Miss Carver stood, quite calmly, with her wooden pointing stick in her hand.
“Shall we give Dean his first lesson, class?” Miss Carver asked, and Dean realized who she was talking to when he looked around and found that the seats were no longer empty.
There was a student in every seat, clad in trousers and dresses of a similar style to Miss Carver’s. They sat perfectly still, watching Dean expectantly-or, he thought they were. Their eyes were nothing more than bloody triangular sockets; their noses were upside-down triangles; their lips were jagged slices cut away from their skin, curving up into their cheeks and forcing them to smile. Nooses were wrapped loosely around their necks, the rope slinking away to the ceiling where it tied around the wooden beams that hadn’t been there in the modern classroom.
Miss Carver was still standing at the front of the room, eyes on Dean. “A wicked doer giveth heed to false lips; and a liar giveth ear to a naughty tongue,” she quoted. “You are a liar, Dean. And you must be taught a lesson.”
She stepped forward and pressed a stick of chalk into Dean’s hand. He took it warily, aware that she had so far made no move to slice his face open.
“I want you to write ‘I will not lie’ on the board,” she told him, and Dean snorted, stepping up to the left side of the blackboard. If this was what she wanted him to do, he’d play her little game. Sam would show up sooner or later with the gun, or the body, or preferably both, and until then he could play her little game.
“How many times should I write it, teacher?” he asked with a smirk, readying his hand with the chalk pressed against the board.
A slow grin curled up on her face, eyes dark through her glasses. “As many as will fit on the board.”
Dean shook his head. Too easy.
He looked right.
His stomach dropped.
The board stretched on and on, seemingly endless on his right side, disappearing into the distance where the room had apparently been stretched to accommodate the immeasurable blackboard.
Oh. Crap.
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Sam was about to take off after Dean down the hall when the man who was obviously Marty Robinson burst out, “Can you please tell me what’s going on here?”
“Uh…” Sam stalled, gazing around, keeping tabs of where Dean had gone. He’d been heading to where the old schoolhouse had been. But this man and woman were staring at him as though he were an alien-well, he thought, I am swinging a gun around, and I still have my custodian uniform on-and on top of that, he could hear the commotion continuing in the auditorium, the clamor as people pressed up against the exits in the lobby. He figured soon they would start swarming to the side halls that flanked the auditorium, and then this back hall as well, looking for other doors around the school that might be open but which Sam didn’t even have to check to know they were locked.
“I can,” the woman cut in. “That man’s been pretending to be you all week.”
Marty stared at her incredulously. “I know that, Linda. But why? And how? And who are you?” He directed this last question at Sam.
“That’s… a good question,” he replied, starting to edge around Marty. “One which I will be happy to answer… later.” He started jogging after Dean, but before he could get too far, a girl appeared from a side hallway and hurried his way. “Hey!” he called out as she neared. “Hey-Audrey, right?”
She stopped and her eyes traveled over him, her nose scrunching with disdain at his gray uniform. “Yeah?” she whispered cautiously.
“Where did D-where did Mr. Robinson go?”
“I’m right here!” Marty shouted from behind him. Sam rolled his eyes and clenched his hands into fists, ignoring him.
“He…” She shook her head, letting out a deep breath. “I don’t… She took him.”
“Who? Miss Carver.”
Looking horrified, Audrey nodded. Sam was just about to take off down the hall in the direction she’d come when she spluttered, “She locked him in. I tried opening the door.” She shook her head.
“Great,” Sam muttered. “Okay. I need to find her body, then. I might need your help.”
Audrey seemed to push through the shock and fear marring her features. “You’re… a janitor.”
Sam wanted to slap her but managed to restrain himself. No time. “Yeah. It’s Halloween. This is my costume. Besides,” he added, tucking the gun back into his pants. “Mopping’s not really what I had in mind.”
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Dean knew that Sam’s friends at school-at every school they ended up in-asked him why he didn’t dress up for Halloween.
Nobody at school-at any school they ended up in-asked Dean why he didn’t dress up. Probably because he didn’t hang out with anyone often enough for them to notice or care. He didn’t need a Halloween costume, anyway: he was always already something unique. At one school he was the criminal destined for a life in the big house. At another he was the geek who read books on Latin even though the school didn’t offer that as a language. At another he was the class clown always skipping out on detention. And on Halloween, when everyone was dressed in ridiculous store-bought and homemade costumes, Dean was still the criminal, or the Latin geek, or the slacker goof-off.
It wasn’t because of the classes and schoolwork that Dean didn’t like high school-though he wasn’t exactly fond of all the busywork and useless testing. He managed passing grades without trying very hard. Still, though, that wasn’t why Dean always remembered high school with a sense of repulsion. It was just a fact that loners tended not to like high school. Where everyone was walking around with their cliques, prejudging and categorizing and gossiping, there was simply no room for the loner. He was cast out, stared at, and then forgotten.
Sam thought Dean had been worshipped in high school as the typical popular guy who was always cracking jokes, making everyone laugh, and passing his classes without a modicum of effort. It was cool not to like school, which was why Sam had never been popular-though he had always had friends. But Sam hadn’t really been very clued into Dean’s high school experience, anyway.
Halloween was always a reminder of where he stood, in his leather jacket and ripped-up jeans and thrift store sneakers, against the vicious masses of merciless high school teenagers. And yet it was a holiday so loved by normal teenagers, and it was the one day a year when his world and the ‘normal’ world seemed to mix. Dean wanted to like it. Felt he should like it. It was the kind of normal he could fit into.
Dean never told Sam why he hated high school so much. He also never told Sam that he actually hated Halloween just as much as Sam did. But Dean was a good liar, and he figured it wasn’t any of Sam’s business, anyway.
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Dean’s hand was starting to cramp up, and his entire palm was covered in a fine white powder from the chalk. He’d written ‘I will not lie’ about fifty times already, so he only had… about a bazillion minus fifty left to go, give or take.
“So being a liar makes me a bad student?” he asked as he wrote.
Miss Carver came up just behind him; her breath was cold on the back of his neck. She held all the intimidation and domination of the most ruthless, power-hungry teachers out to snatch bad kids up and make them suffer.
“Being a liar makes you a bad person. Being a bad person makes you a bad student. You are a bad student for many reasons, Dean, but right now I see a dirty, rotten liar standing in front of me, needing to learn his lesson. Keep going.”
He wrote ‘I will not lie’ again, wondering where the hell Sam was and why he hadn’t busted into the room yet.
He could feel Miss Carver grinning behind him.
“You’re scared of Hell, aren’t you, Dean?”
He felt his stomach bottom out.
“But you’re a liar. You tell nothing but untruths. You say you’re ready to die, but you lie. You are terrified. And you will die, terrified, alone, and you will go to Hell because you are a sinner.” He could hear the glower in her cold voice. “You make deals with devils. You kill. You are a bad person, Dean.” He felt her step back. She brought the wooden stick down faster than he could register, and it cracked sharply against his right forearm, jerking it down from the sting and dragging a jagged line down from the ‘n’ he was writing with the chalk. He hissed, felt an angry welt rising under his shirt.
“You must be taught a lesson,” she continued, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up from static electricity that once again flowed through the air, forcing his arm back into place so that he could continue writing. “Because if you don’t learn, you will be punished.”
He glanced over his shoulder to find that her wooden pointer was leaning against the closest desk, and that she now held in her hand a gleaming butcher’s knife. The children sat behind her, watching him through empty, gouged-out sockets.
Come on, Sam, he thought as he went back to writing.
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Sam flipped his phone shut. Straight to voicemail. Whatever dimension Dean had slipped into, apparently there was no cell coverage there.
“Okay, Audrey, tell me everything you’ve ever heard about Miss Carver,” he ordered. “And quickly.”
“Everything I know, you’ve probably heard,” she said in a rush. “Uh… she killed her students. Well, maybe left one alive, I think. Disappeared afterwards. Was-was kind of a freak, never left the school, people say she probably lived there.”
“Where?” Sam demanded, aware that he was not helping the frightened girl at all but not caring. Dean was trapped with a homicidal ghost and would die before his year was up if Sam didn’t find the body. “Where would she live in a little one-room schoolhouse?”
“I don’t know!” Audrey cried out. “The-the secret cellar?”
Sam’s feet felt glued to the hallway. He was aware that Marty and Linda were standing near them, listening to their conversation. He was aware that loud voices were still issuing from the auditorium-he hoped that somebody was taking down the body and they weren’t killing each other in there. He was aware that Audrey, this young high school student with dark red hair and a black costume dress and stage makeup coating her face, looked as though she were drowning after everything that had happened. He just couldn’t bring himself to care.
“Cellar?” he repeated, hope blooming for the first time since they’d gotten to Fair Hill.
Audrey nodded eagerly like a student excited to have the right answer. “Supposedly there was a secret cellar in the schoolhouse, but nobody’s ever found it.”
Sudden shouting from the auditorium. A dispute. It sounded as though factions were forming, arguing about what to do. Sam couldn’t worry about them at the moment; he had too many other things jamming up his brain right now.
“Did somebody just say that someone in there is dead?” Marty cut in, head cocked like a dog listening to an inhumanly high whistle as he tried to discern what the voices in the auditorium were saying. “I thought I heard… nobody’s going to tell us what’s going on, are they?”
Sam ignored him. “If there was a hidden cellar… who would know how to find it? Who goes in the main basement here?”
Linda raised her hand. “The basement’s not very big; it’s just used for storage. Extra desks and stuff we can’t fit in the rooms, old equipment. The janitors are in charge of storage. Which you should know already,” she pointed out, nodding at him.
“Huh?” He frowned and glanced down at his gray uniform. “Oh. Right. Yeah, I don’t actually work here.”
Marty rolled his eyes, clearly exasperated with the woman. “Are you in the habit of letting strange men who pretend to work here wander the halls unattended?” he snapped, clearly losing his cool.
Shifting her weight to her other foot, looking somewhat abashed, Linda muttered, “I need a drink.”
“I knew it,” Marty gloated.
“Shut up,” Sam snapped. “Linda, do you have a list of the phone numbers of everyone who works here?”
She nodded.
The excitement that came with solving a difficult case washed over Sam like a cool tidal wave. “Good. I know who we need to call.”
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Dean’s hand slipped, and he dropped the chalk. He wiped away some of the powder on his jeans, one of his few pairs that wasn’t already stained, before bending down to pick up the chalk. It had become a little nub, having already broken in half, and was hardly big enough to continue using.
It was better than getting his face carved up like a jack-o-lantern, which he was certain would happen if he stopped writing, but it was punishment all the same. His arm was getting tired, and it seemed less and less likely that Sam was going to show up any time soon, which made him start to worry about how long he would have to keep this up before he simply couldn’t continue, resulting in him surely getting butchered for not having “learned his lesson.” Of course, if his endurance surpassed his expectations, maybe Miss Carver would eventually just get bored and kill him anyway. She didn’t seem the type to let him stop and tell him that he was educated, a good student, and could go home with all of his face.
“So all students are bad students? That’s what this is all about? You’re teaching us that even the good ones aren’t really good?” he asked, hoping to at least get some information out of her if he was to be subjected to writing lines on a blackboard that had shrunk to its original side but that wiped itself clean every so often, meaning he would never be finished.
“There are no good students,” she repeated from behind him. “Robbie Burns. I thought he was a good student.” It unnerved him to have his back exposed to her, but he wasn’t armed anyway, so even if he could have seen her it wouldn’t have done him much good. “It was only later that I came to my senses and realized that he was not a good student. Not at all.”
Dean’s handwriting was getting even sloppier than usual. He momentarily paused to flex his hand, clenching and stretching his fingers before continuing his lines. “What happened?”
He chanced a glance backward, which revealed Miss Carver standing several feet behind him, a murderous glare on her face, the children sitting behind her in their seats, quiet and still. Revenge and murder danced in her dark, beady eyes.
“I let him live.”
Realization dawned on Dean as soon as the words were out of her mouth.
He paused, the chalk squeaking against the blackboard as he dragged it to a halt before finishing Miss Carver’s sentence.
“And then he killed you.”
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