Haunted Chapter 3/5
Title: Haunted 3/5
Author: tyranusfan
Characters: Dean, Sam, Adam, Bobby, OCs
Genre: Horror, hurt/comfort
Rating: PG
Word Count: 5,709
Spoilers: Up through Season 5 finale Swan Song, AU for season 6 and later
Disclaimer: I own nothing. All characters property of Warner Bros.
<<<<<< >>>>>>
Chapter 3
The Next Night
Ted looked pleased as the beam he’d been cutting the day before fit perfectly into place along the north wall of the study. Annette watched from the doorway as her husband slid the wood into place, then grinned with pleasure as he reached for a hammer.
“I see you’re feeling better,” she said softly.
He glanced at her over his shoulder, frowning slightly. “What do you mean?”
“Yesterday you were…well, you were worrying me.”
“Really?” His frown deepened. “Oh. I’m sorry. I guess I’m just tired, you know. This two-person construction crew thing we have going really wears me out.”
“Maybe we need to get away. Take a vacation.”
Ted shrugged. “Sure, maybe. When Ian’s school lets out.”
Annette nodded as she suppressed a sudden chill, rubbing her shivering arms. “Yeah. If nothing else happens.”
She didn’t know why, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong. Doctor Stantz had called and told them the problem was fixed, but for some reason, it didn’t feel like it. At all.
“I don’t know why you’re still worrying about it,” Ted broke into her thoughts, stepping over to hold her. “Those guys from the university said they’ve taken care of it. They believed our story and apparently helped us out. We haven’t heard a thing all day. I’d say things are looking up.”
Annette couldn’t help but smile. “I guess so.”
“Now,” Ted released her, and went back to the work bench, “you want to sand or scrape?”
She laughed. “Neither! I’ll go put on dinner.”
“Ooh, what are we having?”
“That smoked salmon I found at the market.”
“That sounds great!” Ted exclaimed, overcompensating.
She loved him for trying to lighten the mood. “For twenty-four ninety-five a pound, it better be!” she shot back, heading downstairs.
<<<<<< >>>>>>
Ian was coloring at the dining room table while she cooked. He was coping as well as any five-year-old, but she knew he missed his father and didn’t truly understand why their lives had changed so much. Maybe someday soon she would find a way to explain it all to him.
The fish was nearly done, so she called Ian over while she arranged the plates. “Can you go and get Uncle Ted for Mommy? Dinner’s ready.”
Ian nodded and bounded up the stairs, as he was prone to doing. Annette set the table.
<<<<<< >>>>>>
Ted went back to work after Annette left. He was glad her spirits appeared to be rising. It had been a difficult year for both of them, and for a while she hadn’t seemed to be coping well.
He placed another two-by-four on the bench and started measuring. The study was coming along nicely: two of the walls were already redone. Though, the scientists from Wake had found something bizarre behind a loose panel. Ted couldn’t tell what the brass levers and pipes did, exactly. It was just another mystery for him to solve.
The air turned frigid while Ted made pencil marks on the new beam.
Another mystery. It seemed all the house had were mysteries. And tragedies. This place has taken my brother, my business…it’s tormenting my wife. When will it end?
Ted dropped the pencil. What was the point? There was always another catastrophe waiting around the corner. Those guys from the university couldn’t help with that. I’ve put all this work into this house…and it’s going nowhere.
Ted just didn’t know why he even tried to move on.
<<<<<< >>>>>>
The pasta was almost ready, so Annette moved on to the salads. She had the salad on the table before she realized that it had been several minutes, and Ian wasn’t back yet.
“Ian! Ted! Dinner’s almost ready!”
What’s taking them so long?
She sighed, then wiped her hands and headed upstairs. “Ian? Ted?”
Ian was giggling, and Annette could hear the floor creaking like he was running. She rounded the corner into the study.
“Ted-?” Annette froze.
Ted was hanging from one of the exposed rafters, neck at an unnatural angle, eyes wide but unseeing, his mouth hanging open.
Ian was running back and forth, swinging the body as if he was on a playground, and laughing. “Mommy! Uncle Ted and I are swinging!”
Annette stared at him, then at the body, back and forth, and did the only thing she could think of.
She screamed.
<<<<<< >>>>>>
Dean turned away from the television and watched as Sam dropped onto the other bed with a sigh. They’d all woken up late after spending half the night out celebrating Adam’s successful hunt. Dean had stayed in, cleaning their weapons, while Sam took Adam out running.
Poor guy. Sammy’s killing him!
Not that the younger man went willingly. Adam had griped all the way out the door. But Sam was too much like their dad: there was no saying no when he had his tractor beam on you.
Adam took the first shower when they got back, leaving Dean and Sam alone in the room. Sam was using his t-shirt to wipe sweat from his eyes. It was the first time they’d been alone in a few days.
Dean looked at his brother casually while he cleaned the bore on his pearl-handled automatic. “Nice run?”
“Yeah.”
“Adam bitch the whole time?”
Sam ran his hand through his hair and chuckled. “The whole six miles…but he’ll appreciate it one of these days.”
“I wouldn’t bank on that,” Dean huffed, reassembling the handgun. “So, uh…are you okay?”
Sam glanced at him, brow furrowing slightly. “Yeah…just winded.”
Dean stared at him for a long moment. He deliberately kept his tone light. “I, uh, heard you get up last night. Can’t imagine any email worth reading at four in the morning.”
The expression on his brother’s face fell. Sam shifted his gaze to the television and kept it there. “Look…Dean….”
There was no mistaking the reluctance on Sam’s face, and the way his mouth was tensing, Dean knew immediately it would be like pulling teeth. He decided to back off. Dean wanted to help, but forcing a confession or revelation out of Sam wouldn’t help anything, and might make it worse. “It’s okay, Sammy. Just…if you ever want to talk…you know.”
Sam glanced at him, finally, and nodded. “I- Just give me a little time. Okay?”
Dean nodded firmly, once. “Sure, man.” Maybe Adam is right…
A brief, troubled expression crossed Sam’s face, but he kept quiet and just stared at the television.
A moment later, Adam emerged from the bathroom, clad in a clean pair of jeans, a towel draped over his shoulders.
Dean smirked. “Well, if it isn’t the Running Man. Feel better?”
Adam padded barefoot over to his duffel bag, grumbling something barely audible about lazy older brothers, but before Dean could pursue the comment, Sam spoke up.
“Hey, turn the volume up, Dean.”
Dean followed Sam’s look to the TV, reaching for the remote. The Flemings’ house was on the screen, with several emergency vehicles parked in the driveway.
“…called to this house on Maplewood Ave. Authorities were called when one of the house’s owners, Ted Fleming, was found dead in an upstairs room. Mr. Fleming’s wife called 9-1-1, but Mr. Fleming was pronounced dead at the scene. A police spokesman tells WXII that there were no signs of foul play, and this appears to be a tragic suicide.”
“What the hell?” Adam had come to stand near Sam’s bed. “I thought we got it.”
Dean turned the volume down and glanced over grimly. “We missed something.”
<<<<<< >>>>>>
Sam exited the house and slipped past the two cops chatting near the front door, joining Dean and Adam near the roadside mailbox.
“Just gave that study a quick once-over. EMF is off the charts! Even taking that transformer into account, the readings were way too high. You talk to Mrs. Fleming?”
Dean pointed to where Annette was standing with her son, talking to the police. “For a minute. She’s pretty messed up. Said Ted was acting funny yesterday while they were out, but seemed fine today.”
“Just like the first husband,” Adam added.
“She said the kid found him at dinnertime,” Dean continued. “Thought Ted was playing a game. Pretty gruesome.”
Adam nodded toward the ambulance. “They said Ted definitely hanged himself. There was nothing to suggest that anyone killed him.”
Sam scanned the grounds, noting that the news crew had already pulled out. The paramedics were packing up, and the police wouldn’t be far behind. “We need to get in there and go over the house again.”
Dean dangled the house keys. “Annette said she’s not going back if she can help it. She’s staying with a friend for the next few days.”
They loitered near the Impala, cautiously stocking two duffel bags with their weapons and supplies, waiting for the authorities to clear out. They were parked a few houses down the street so as not to attract attention.
“Maybe it was a poltergeist instead of a spirit,” Adam ventured, packing salt and holy water into one bag.
“Maybe,” Dean acknowledged. “Some of the signs are the same, and just because there’s no history, it doesn’t mean one wasn’t attracted to this place when Alex killed himself.”
Sam grunted, staring vaguely in the house’s direction. Dean nudged him. “Something on your mind?”
“Why wouldn’t it attack Annette or Ian, too?” Sam asked, gaze distant. “Why just the husband?”
“Well, Annette said she saw something around the fireplace. Maybe it just didn’t have a chance to get her.”
“Mmm. Maybe.” Sam didn’t sound convinced. “Hey, last cops leaving.”
Dean double-checked their duffels, then closed the trunk. “All right. Let’s go. Keep your eyes open.”
They walked nonchalantly up the street, and crossed into the Flemings’ yard. After a careful look around the premises, Dean unlocked the front door and they slipped inside.
<<<<<< >>>>>>
The second floor study seemed the best place to start. Both Alex and Ted had hanged themselves from the exposed ceiling rafters-almost in the exact same spot, right in front of the wall panel concealing the odd levers Sam had discovered.
Sam pulled the sawhorse over and climbed up to get a better look at the rafters. The beams themselves didn’t appear special. Angling the flashlight upward, he peered into the dusty gloom above the ceiling panels.
“They were collecting more than dust,” Sam called down. “There’s ectoplasm up here. A lot of it. Dripping down the support beams.”
“Ectoplasm?” Adam incredulously asked from below. “Like ghost slime? From the movies?”
“Yeah,” Dean answered, trying in vain to peek past Sam’s bulky frame to see for himself. “It’s real. But it only manifests when you have a seriously powerful spirit.”
“Or a really pissed off one,” Sam added from above.
“We’ve only seen it two or three times in our lives,” Dean finished.
“Hey,” Sam pulled the flashlight back, holding the rafters to steady himself while he climbed down, “didn’t Annette say she saw a spirit in the fireplace? I’ll bet we find some dried up slime down there.”
He looked around the study for a moment, then walked over to where Ted had been working. The plastic tarp was bundled up in the corner, leaving a clear view of the exposed space behind the walls. More ectoplasm stained the newer studs Ted had been building. Deeper inside, though, Sam saw something else.
“More of those symbols. Like on those levers.”
“You still think you’ve seen them somewhere?” Adam asked, peering into the mass of brass piping Sam found.
“Somewhere…” Sam twisted his neck to look beyond the remaining wall panels. “They go up. Toward the third floor, looks like.”
“What’s above this room?” Dean asked, glancing at the ceiling.
<<<<<< >>>>>>
The third floor was more deteriorated than the first two. Annette had told them that very little work had been done because the wiring needed to be replaced. They moved through the dusty hallway until they found a spot almost directly over the study. The entrance to the room had been closed off with a plaster wall long before.
Sam shone his flashlight along the discolored plaster surface. They’d passed the wall during their first scan of the house, but Ted probably wouldn’t have appreciated them breaking into it, so they’d left it. “Someone didn’t want anyone going in there. What do you think it was?”
Adam was closest to the wall, and was pulling a plastic cover off a square hole in the wood near the edge of the plaster. He looked inside. “Looks like they cut this to get to the wiring. It goes all the way through…I don’t know. Might be another study, or a library maybe. There are covers over everything.”
“We should find a way inside,” Sam said, shining his flashlight down the hallway, looking for another entrance.
“I think I can handle that,” Dean replied with a smirk.
He turned and descended the stairs, returned a minute later. Sam’s eyebrows rose when he saw what Dean returned with.
“I think these’ll help.” Dean handed one of the sledgehammers to Sam.
Sam handed his light off to Adam, then set to work. Within a few minutes, they’d opened a hole large enough to pass through. Next, though, they found that the door to the room had also been covered in plywood.
“Someone really didn’t want anyone going in there,” Sam noted, bemused.
The sledgehammers made short work of the rotten wood, and they were through.
The room was clearly a library. Tall bookcases lined the walls on either side. A small table with chairs sat in front of the entranceway, and farther back, before a boarded-up window, sat a huge desk. Everything was carefully covered over with heavy canvas sheets. When they pulled the nearest sheet off, the table beneath was perfectly clean.
Within a matter of moments, Dean and Sam had all the canvas covers removed, and were searching the shelves while Adam searched the desk.
Sam whistled softly. “Look at this stuff…” he said, more than a hint of fascination in his voice. “Almost all of these books date back to the 1800s. I’ve only seen one so far that was written after 1900.”
“Glad to see your inner geek is as healthy as ever,” Dean shot back, shining his flashlight on the shelves as he moved. “Is it just me, or are all of these grimoires and demonology books?”
“I think so,” Sam replied. “Old ones. Dangerous ones.” He came to the end of one shelf and ran his light over the wooden side. Another symbol was carved into the wood, a chalice shape with a semicircle inside. A bar crossed the stem of the chalice, forming a small cross. “Hey, Dean? Over here.”
Dean joined him, shining his light in the same area. “What is that?”
“The symbol for Pluto,” Sam answered, studying the carving.
“Not the dog, I’m assuming.”
Sam chuckled. “No. The mythological Pluto. King of the Underworld, according to some myths. In astrology, it’s associated with death and rebirth, world events, like the rise and fall of empires and stuff like that.”
Dean nodded. “Comforting.”
“Hey, check this out,” Adam called from behind the huge desk. He was flipping through a leather-bound book that resembled their father’s journal. “This is the journal of Nicolas Shandor. Hey, Sam, didn’t you say the first owner of this place was a Nicolas?”
Sam glanced over at him from the book shelves. “Yeah. Novak was his last name, though.”
Adam was reading the last page of the journal and frowning. “Um, I don’t think so. Listen to this. ‘I have done all I can. Father’s legacy permeates this place, but with him dead, the beast cannot awaken. I would burn the house as well, but I do not know what the result would be. It might well release it, and that is too dangerous.
‘I tried to burn the books, but Father protected them somehow. I decided instead to leave them here. Someone with more experience may be able to use them to undo what Father tried to set into motion.
‘I changed everything over to Mother’s name. I have come to believe the Shandor line is cursed by the darkness Father and his friends harnessed. With luck, no one will ever find out.’”
Adam checked the previous page and pointed to the header. “January 31, 1930.”
Sam had moved to read along over Adam’s shoulder. He pursed his lips as he considered the evidence, then reached for his duffel and brought out his photocopies from the records office. “That…actually might answer some questions. The deed for the house looked fishy to me. I thought at first it had just deteriorated with age, but the paper looked weird on the line where Nicolas Novak’s name was printed.”
“So?” Dean asked from across the room. He had moved from the shelves and was scanning the ceiling with his flashlight.
“So,” Sam continued, “maybe the paper wasn’t damaged. Maybe the names had been changed. Nicolas might not have been the original owner of this house.”
“Changed by who? Nicolas?” Adam asked.
“Sure. Look at this house. The family obviously had money. They could grease a few palms in the records office just as easily back then as they can now. Maybe easier.”
Adam considered that, then frowned. “Why?”
Sam shrugged. “Maybe the father was interested in things that embarrassed the family. I mean, check out these books. Looks like he was into everything: alchemy, sorcery, necromancy… You name it, he’s got a book on it.”
Dean was still staring upward. “So, little Nicky and the rest of the family don’t like what Dad is into, so they change the names, pay off the records clerks, and seal all the dad’s stuff up in here and hope no one finds it.”
“From the look of that wall, no one did,” Adam said, gesturing toward the door. “Until now.”
Sam noticed that Dean was still looking up. He followed his brother’s gaze, tilting his head to examine the ceiling. More of the brass pipes and conduits ran along the ceiling, following along what appeared to be a seam in the stucco. “Dean? What is it?”
Dean grunted. “I don’t know. Does that look weird to you?”
“What, the seam?”
“Yeah. It doesn’t line up with the room. See? It comes across at an angle, away from the line of the walls. The pipes follow it. More of those same symbols, too.”
Sam was looking, but his eyes zeroed in on something else. “Dean, over toward the wall. Those are different. I know I’ve seen those symbols before.”
Dean shifted his light to where Sam was focused. He recognized the new symbols, too. “Wait, aren’t those-?”
“Yeah,” Sam said grimly. “That’s exactly what they are.”
Adam stood from the desk and moved to Sam’s side. “What?”
“They’re from the Key of Solomon.” A shiver moved up his spine. “We need to go to a library.”
“Let’s try the university. They’re probably open all night,” Dean suggested.
“Yeah.” Sam nodded, staring at the symbols painted above them. “And we need to see if the plans for this house still exist. I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.”
<<<<<< >>>>>>
Adam and Sam stopped off at the Wake Forest library while Dean headed to the county records department. They set up shop in a private study room in a quiet, deserted corner of the book stacks.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Adam asked. He hadn’t quite picked up on the silent language his brothers excelled at. The connection between the house and the odd symbols eluded him.
“Answers,” Sam replied cryptically, a coy smile tugging at his mouth. “Adam, I need you to have a seat and go through Nicolas’ journal page by page. See if you can find any details about what his father was up to, and what Nicolas wanted to hide.”
“Where are you going?”
“To test a theory. I’ll be back. If Dean calls, tell him where we are.”
Sam was out the door before Adam replied, “O-okay. I’ll just…be here.”
His brother was in full geek mode tonight. Adam chuckled and started reading the journal from the beginning.
It wasn’t the most scintillating read Adam had ever tried. The writing style was stilted and Nicolas’ command of English was…questionable. Most of the entries pertained to early adolescence, and barely mentioned the father at all. Apparently, Nicolas was closer to his mother. Adam paused about three quarters of the way through.
That’s interesting. The father was mentioned much more frequently after Nicolas turned eighteen. So were the father’s friends. Adam started taking notes.
Sam returned about an hour later with a stack of copies.
Adam looked up as his brother entered. “Find anything?”
“Yeah.” Sam looked grim. “A lot. You?”
Adam tapped the journal in his hands. “Nicolas has some choice words for dear old dad starting on page fifty.”
Sam nodded at the journal. “Starting about 1920, I bet.”
Before Adam could ask about that, Sam’s cell rang. From the way Sam spoke, it was obviously Dean. “Yeah, second floor. All the way back by the water fountain. Yeah.”
Dean arrived about two minutes later, carrying a large rolled up sheet of paper. “Found the blueprints for the Flemings’ house.”
Adam frowned and checked his watch. It was 12:35. “The…records office was still open?”
Both his brothers paused at that.
Dean looked at Adam like he was crazy. “No. Of course not. What kind of question is that?”
Blushing, Adam scolded himself. “Sorry. Stupid question. I’m just- Forget it.”
Dean smirked at him, then unrolled the blueprints on the table.
Adam whistled appreciatively. The house was a lot more complex than it looked. There were extra spaces between the rooms, a few sets of stairs that weren’t even visible, and what looked like an extremely overdesigned plumbing system. “This is…”
“Wild, right?” Dean filled in. “I joked about Dracula’s castle, but I had no idea.”
Sam spread his notes onto the tabletop. “That fits with everything I dug up. Nicolas’ father’s name was Gyula Shandor. He was an architect around the turn of the century. Old money, immigrated here from Europe. He designed a lot of buildings back in the 1800s, but almost all of them have been torn down. Too complicated. Maintenance nightmares. All except this house.”
“The Flemings’,” Adam said.
“Right. This house was his masterpiece. From what I read, he drove the construction crews crazy, only showed them sections of the plans, never the whole thing. Switched out crews after every section was finished. Real nut job. It was only finished after twenty years. He nearly blew the family fortune doing it.”
Adam pointed to the journal. “As far as Nicolas could tell, Shandor and his friends had been designing it since before he was born.”
“What friends?” Dean asked.
Sam pointed to the corner of the blueprint sheet. There was a small symbol, a square and compass together.
Dean blinked. “Isn’t that the sign of the Freemasons?”
“Yeah,” Sam confirmed. “Shandor joined up back in Europe, and a lot of the members of his group came over the same year he did. There were about twenty-five of them altogether. All about the same age.”
Dean considered that. “The Freemasons… Wasn’t there a rumor about them worshipping the devil?”
“There was. In the late 1890s, a couple of Christian evangelicals accused the Freemasons of worshipping Baphomet, which is another name for Lucifer. But it was exposed as a hoax. A man named Levi drew up a newspaper cartoon to go with the article.” Sam produced an old drawing. In it, men in robes carried a throne bearing a goat with human arms, great horns, and black wings. An inverted pentagram was drawn on the goat’s head.
“That’s the Tarot card image of Satan,” Dean said, frowning.
Sam nodded. “Apparently the accusing newspaper article is the original source of the Tarot image, and Satanists still use it to this day. But the Freemasons proved the whole thing to be false. The evangelicals were lying. That’s where it would have ended, except for this.” He produced a printout. “Shortly after the hoax was made public, a small group of Freemasons were ostracized from the organization. They fled Europe before anyone could question them. About twenty-six men.”
“Shandor and his buddies?”
Sam nodded.
Dean held up the old drawing. “So, you think Shandor’s group of Freemasons actually did worship the devil?”
“A splinter sect,” Sam corrected. “And probably not the actual Devil. There are other sources that say Baphomet was just a demon. A powerful one, but not Lucifer himself.”
Adam noticed the subtle way Sam cringed when he talked about Lucifer. He covered it well, but it was obvious the mere mention of the name reminded him of things he didn’t want to think about.
Adam couldn’t blame him, but he could give Sam a moment to regroup. “Nicolas’ journal mentioned that his father and his friends were always locking themselves away. Nicolas heard chanting and a lot of Latin being spoken. When they were done, they would all leave, and he’d find candles, leaves, weird-looking oils-”
“Summoning rituals,” Dean interrupted. “Bastards were summoning the thing.”
“That would explain that library. Demonology, black magic, astrology. Shandor was neck deep in the stuff,” Sam said. He looked slightly more relaxed, scratching idly at the back of his neck.
“Okay, so why the house fetish?” Dean muttered, studying the plans while his brothers spoke.
“Apparently, he was obsessed,” Sam explained. “According to some of the witnesses, Shandor was manic-depressive. He’d be fine one day and almost suicidal the next. Whenever there was a delay on the house, he’d just lose it.”
Dean took that in. “Fine one day, suicidal the next. That sound familiar?”
It didn’t take long to click. Adam snapped his fingers. “Ted and Alex Fleming. Annette said they both were acting like that. Obsessing over the renovation.”
“The spirit haunting that house was never Alex Fleming,” Sam cut in, looking at Dean. “I think it was Shandor all along. Annette told you this all started when Alex was working in the basement.”
“The basement.” Adam frowned, then checked his notes. “Nicolas wrote something… Here it is. One entry, dated December 1929. ‘When I arrived downstairs, the others were already dead, but I believe I stopped him in time. May God forgive me. Only three survived.’ That’s all. Just three lines.”
“Gyula Shandor disappeared in late 1929. Nobody saw him or his Freemason sect again. The police gave up the search, and Nicolas inherited everything.”
“You think Nicky killed his dad?” Dean asked incredulously.
“Or stopped him.” Sam held up his cell. “I sent this drawing to Bobby. According to one of his books, Baphomet is an old demon, and powerful. Bobby said there were stories of him going all the way back to the Crusades. But he can only return to Earth with a massive sacrifice. Forty souls-forty men-and they have to give their souls up willingly.”
“Well, that explains why it didn’t kill Annette or the kid, but why forty?” Adam asked.
“Biblical numerology. The Noah’s Ark story? It rained for forty days. The number means death,” Dean interjected.
“Demons really care about that stuff?”
Dean shrugged. “Honestly? Sometimes I think they’re just screwing with us.”
“Anyway,” Sam pointed at the journal, “it says ‘the others were already dead.’ Maybe they were trying to summon this thing and Nicolas prevented them from finishing it.”
Adam frowned. “If it takes forty sacrifices, and there were only twenty-six men in this cult….”
“They’d need more,” Dean agreed. “Where’d they find ’em?”
Sam sat and pulled the laptop out of his duffel. “Let’s find out.”
<<<<<< >>>>>>
It didn’t take long to put the pieces together. Sam turned the laptop so the others could see. “Missing persons reports. Shandor finished his house in 1925. Between 1928 and 1929, fifteen people went missing in the neighborhoods surrounding this one. None of them turned up again.”
“Twenty-five and fifteen.” Adam nodded. “That would do it.”
Dean held up his hand. “The police didn’t notice all these disappearances in one area?”
Sam shrugged. “It was the twenties. Prohibition was on, and there was a big smuggling problem in this area. A lot of the men who disappeared were thought to be rumrunners, and the police just assumed the worst and wrote them off.”
“All right. These Freemasons all off themselves, but what about the other fifteen? I doubt they’d kill themselves willingly.”
“They might not have to,” Sam pointed out. “You saw all those black magic tomes. Hex bags, spells, it wouldn’t be hard for Shandor to force those men into committing suicide. So long as they chose to die, it probably didn’t matter why.”
“Leaving Shandor.”
“Probably as the vessel,” Sam said. “Most demons need a host when they come topside.”
There was an awkward pause as they all fell silent. They had experience with the vessel thing, and it wasn’t particularly pleasant to think about.
Adam crossed his arms, shaking himself out of his thoughts. “Well, three of them escaped, thanks to Nicolas, and he killed Shandor, so the demon never got his forty.”
Dean didn’t look pleased. “It’s getting close, though.” At Adam’s perplexed look, he explained. “Alex disturbs Shandor’s spirit when he starts re-flooring the basement. Next thing we know, he’s killing himself. Ted moves in after everything’s settled down, and when he picks up in the parts of the house where his brother left off, suddenly he kills himself. Two men who want to die…two willing sacrifices. Shandor’s trying to finish what he started.”
“That means he only needs one more sacrifice,” Adam said. “Then what? The demon gets out of Hell?”
Dean looked at Sam, but his younger brother didn’t seem to be paying attention. Sam was staring at the blueprints of the house. “Sam?”
“Maybe it’s already out.”
Adam blinked. “What do you mean?”
Sam didn’t answer immediately, just stood and stared at the blueprints, turning the paper and cocking his head to the side like he was trying to see something. He picked up the sheet and held it out, backward, to Dean. “Can you…hold this up to the light for me?”
He went to pick up a marker from his duffel while Dean held the house plans up at an angle. Sam walked back and stared at the blueprints from the other side, biting his lip for a moment. Then he started drawing on the back with the marker.
“Uh, Sam?” Dean tried to see his brother’s face around the large sheet. “You’re doodling on city property.”
“Says the guy who robbed the records office,” Adam chided.
“Shut up.”
Sam drew some more, then stepped back, shaking his head. “This is…insane.”
“What?” Dean asked, peeking over the sheet to see what Sam had drawn.
Before he caught a glimpse, Sam grabbed the blueprints and laid them out on the table. He drew X’s in the rooms where they had been. “See here? We saw those symbols here and here, and those seams in the ceilings?”
Adam stood to look with them. “You mentioned those symbols earlier, why?”
Dean glanced up at him. “They’re the symbols from a devil’s trap. Just by themselves.”
Adam thought back. He had learned to draw the traps, but hadn’t recognized the symbols out of context. “So, why would Shandor draw them in the house like this? There’s no circle, no pentagram….”
“Yes, there is,” Sam corrected him grimly. He flipped the blueprints over, revealing what he’d drawn. It was a massive devil’s trap, running all the way through the house, with separate sections on each floor joining with the ones above and below. “The lines running along the ceiling in every room? I think it was all part of a complicated devil’s trap. A physical one. The house itself is a trap.”
Dean tilted his head, looking at the drawing. “Well, if you’re right, it looks like the center is in the basement. Where Shandor was doing his ritual…and where Alex was working when all this started. But why summon this demon if you’re just going to trap it?”
He didn’t get a response. Adam looked up, and Sam was staring at the table, not even blinking.
Dean shot Adam a questioning look, then touched Sam’s shoulder. “Hey. Sam?”
Sam started, glancing at Dean as though he’d forgotten he was there. “Hmm?”
“You okay?” Dean asked quietly.
From the look on his face, he knew what had happened, but Sam didn’t meet his gaze directly. “I’m-I’m fine. Sorry.” He splayed his hands helplessly. “Um, I don’t know, the uh, disappearances happened over the course of a year. Maybe this cult needed to keep the demon close until they finished all the sacrifices. However it was supposed to work, I think that thing has been down there this whole time, waiting to get out.”
Adam frowned to himself. At least that episode had been brief. He looked back at his brothers. “We’ve got to stop Shandor before he finds another victim.”
“And before he…” Dean trailed off, staring down at the blueprints again. He reached over and flipped the sheet back to the house plans. “…lets that thing loose.” Pointing to the plans, he looked back up. “I think I get it. All those brass pipes and levers. I bet they somehow open the trap, er, the house, to let the demon out.”
“You mean the whole house would move?” Adam asked.
Sam nodded, following where Dean pointed. “Maybe. The pipes run all through it. That’s probably why he didn’t let the builders see all the designs. He didn’t want them to know how it all worked.”
Dean started packing their duffels. “Either way, we need to get this thing, tonight. Before it kills anyone else.”
TBC