True north- Dean
The building was as gloomy and creepy during the daylight as it was during the night.
Vines had replaced the ceiling in some places and the trees had started to grow inside rather than out. It lent the whole structure a sense of wilderness and abandonment that did little to set Dean at ease.
“What are we even looking for?” Dean asked. Exhausted, he just wanted to lie down and sleep for a week, to rest and allow his bruises to fade, those that marred his skin and those he kept hidden below.
Sam paused, trying to get his bearings. “You saw that grave site, Dean,” he said. “That was an awful lot of graves. Hospitals aren’t even supposed to have graveyards.”
“Typhoid Mary died in here, did you know that?”
“And you know that why?” Sam asked.
“Guy Bobby knew hunted her down,” Dean supplied with a shrug. “Burned her bones right in this place.”
“Typhoid Mary turned into a vengeful spirit?”
Dean’s eyes lingered on his surroundings, trying to imagine how it must’ve looked like in those days. He figured it couldn’t have been much nicer. “Wouldn’t you?” he pointed out casually, his fingers brushing against an old gurney ‘parked’ against the wall. The metal was rusty and the white paint had all but peeled off. The coppery smell of rusted metal was so strong in the air that it felt like they were stuck in a pool of blood.
Dean had imagined that Hell would smell of sulphur and sweat, of shit and fear. Those smells were certainly there too, they were a part of the foul mixture, but none of them managed to mask the smell of blood. It was everywhere.
A prison made of blood and bones, Meg had called it. She had been deadly accurate about that.
The smell of coppery rust, while not exactly the same, was enough to turn Dean’ stomach.
Despite the nausea, he couldn’t just turn tail and walk out. Sam believed that the answer to the murders of Michael’s friends was somewhere in the remaining structure of the hospital and Dean was far from ready to admit that the smell of the place was making his heart race and messing with his mind, making unsure as to where he was.
It hadn’t been that bad the night before, when they’d taken shelter. Maybe it had been the heavy rain, maybe it had been his concussed head, but Dean hadn’t noticed the smell before. Now, it was impossible to ignore.
“That one looks like some kind of office,” Sam called out from the end of the corridor. “I’m gonna check it out.”
Dean nodded, struggling to figure out how Sam had gone from standing right beside him to where he was now. Dean hadn’t even noticed him moving.
The light shifted ever so slightly and Dean almost jumped.
“Get a grip, Dean,” he hissed to himself.
Knuckles curled around the hilt of Ruby’s knife, Dean moved forward. A demon knife wouldn’t do much good with vengeful spirits, Sam had pointed out to him. It wasn’t even made of iron. Dean had flipped him the bird and Sam had just shrugged it off as one more of his brother’s quirks.
Dean was fine with that notion. Better to call it a quirk than to tell Sam what he could feel deep in his bones. A demon’s presence. Nearby.
There was something scratching at the wall, the sound coming from near a metal staircase curling upwards.
The stairs, with a central piece that disappeared into a hole on the ceiling into the upper floor, looked like a human spine. Long, knobby and stretching up.
The floor creaked under Dean’s boots, moaning in complaint about the intrusion of strangers in a place that was long dead, ready to be buried and forgotten under the forest.
The scratching sound was more noticeable near the opening in the ceiling. Moving carefully, Dean set one foot on the first step and peered up.
One blink in which time paused. And then...
A deluge of red liquid came crashing down like the skies had chosen that precise moment to open up on him. Dean had no time to react; his eyes closed on reflex just as the liquid hit his face, but the fact he wasn’t seeing it did nothing to hide the inner realization he had about what the red liquid was.
Blood.
Hot and fluid, as if pumping directly from a living being. Gallons and gallons of it, pouring down and Dean couldn’t move an inch to get out of its way.
It washed over him like a forced baptism. It coated him completely until it was part of him.
Dean only realized that he had stopped breathing when his chest started burning. His mouth opened without his consent, lungs desperate for air taking him out of the equation of decision-making.
Expecting to get a mouth full of blood, Dean cringed, bile already rising in his throat in anticipation.
The absence of anything touching his lips made him open his eyes again. Heart racing and gasping for breath, Dean looked around. There was nothing there.
No blood.
No evidence of there ever been there any blood, certainly not the gallons that he had felt falling over him.
But... he had felt it.
Dean ran a shaking hand over his face. What the hell had that been all about? Ghost echoes usually replayed the dead person’s last moments, not some crazy shower of blood that achieved nothing more than to rattle Dean’s mind.
That had been no ghostly replay, he was sure of that. For one, there was no replay. But it hadn’t been real either.
Dean could find no explanation for what he’d just experienced. No explanation that he wanted to voice anyway, because to tell himself that he was losing his mind would only make it real.
“Hey, you alright?”
The hand on his shoulder made Dean jump in the air and reach for his gun. Fortunately for Sam, Dean stopped himself in time. “Jesus, Sam!” he breathed out, taking a step back to put some distance between them. “Make some noise or something, will you?”
“You losing your hearing?” Sam said. He looked pissed off for some reason. “I called you like three times. You were just... spaced out.”
Dean looked deeply into his brother expression, hoping to see some sort of sign that Sam was seeing the blood that had fallen. Maybe it was there, all over the floor and Dean wasn’t seeing it. But all Dean could find in his brother’s eyes was suspicion and doubt. And the look. “I’m fine.”
It was the wrong thing to say.
“Yeah, you look just fine,” Sam rushed to say as sarcastically as he could manage. And he could manage a lot.
“I just... thought I saw something,” Dean said, sounding too defensive even to his own ears. ”You find anything?”
The change of topic felt forced and desperate, but Dean was glad Sam let it slide.
“Cockroaches, spiders and various other indigenous bugs that didn’t really like me snooping around,” Sam informed, brushing dirt from his clothes. “This place is a health hazard.”
Dean nodded, risking a glance up, towards the opening on the ceiling.
“Think there’s something upstairs?” Sam asked, following his gaze. “This stairs look about ready to fall.”
“The place was emptied decades ago, Sam. I doubt they left anything important behind.”
Sam spun around slowly, running a hand through his hair. “So, what? We dig up all the graves, burn the bones of over 200 people and hope one of them belongs to the ghosts that have been haunting us? Or better yet, turn tail and give up?”
Yes! Dean wanted to open his mouth and let the word escape. Yes, he wanted to leave that place, no matter how much it pained him to fail Michael.
He remembered all too well the younger boy he’d been they'd first met, the resolve on his face as he'd agreed to put his life in their hands.
Dean shivered. The feeling of dread in his stomach was building, yelling at Dean to forget about all that and just go. Get out. Leave. Now!
Dean shook his head. There was something terrible wrong with this whole thing, or maybe there was something terribly wrong with him, he couldn’t tell which. But they were fumbling in the dark and in their line of work, that could be more dangerous than walking blindfolded on top of a skyscraper.
“Is it just me, or did the temperature just go arctic on us?” Sam whispered, raising the piece of broken metal chair in his hands defensively.
The way both brothers moved seamlessly to stand back to back was totally instinctive.
Dean felt it now and held Ruby’s knife at chest height, eyes darting around the corridor. Inside, he was kicking himself for being so distracted with what had happened that he hadn’t even noticed the change in the room’s temperature.
“Something’s coming,” Sam whispered, body coiled for action.
A part of Dean was expecting the same ghost of before, the woman from grave yard, the one with the body-hopping fetish. Instead, it was a little boy’s head that peeked at them from behind the door.
Ghosts of children; Dean hated them the most. A life ended violently, before it had truly begun. They always managed to lure him into thinking that they were harmless. “Heads up,” he called to Sam, making sure his brother was aware of the same threat.
The kid, however, didn’t seem all that intent on attacking them. “Hello?” Dean called out heedfully. It felt weird to be actually talking to a ghost; it was a little like trying to play chess with a lion.
The kid, big round eyes in a gaunt face, focused on him for a few seconds, blinking in and out of existence like there was interference with his ‘signal’. His tiny frame was covered with a light gown, dirty and filled with holes. Dean wondered if he’d been a patient there.
“You’re not like them,” the kid whispered. His voice sounded much too deep to be associated with such a tiny frame. “You’re not like them,” he repeated. Then he turned and moved towards the door.
One look exchanged with his brother and Dean followed, knowing that Sam would be only a couple of steps away. He'd no idea what the boy meant, but the fact that he didn’t attack or simply blink out of existence when they followed him made Dean suspect that this ghost wanted something. From them.
Like Claire, the ghost of the woman murdered by that corrupt detective in Baltimore, there had been no vengeance in this kid’s eyes. Only a sense of despair.
The ghost of the kid led them straight to the rusty remains of thee large furnaces.
A large hand on Dean’s arm stopped him from moving any further. “This could be a trap,” Sam warned.
Dean shrugged off his brother’s fingers and his concern. Trap or no trap, there was something in there that had called that ghost’s attention and Dean was going to make damn sure that it hadn’t been for nothing. Besides, ghosts weren’t prone to use their ghostly brains and pour them into finding elaborate schemes to murder people. They were kind of like the Hulks of the supernatural world. Smash! was usually good enough for them.
“Okay, kid,” Dean announced, stepping inside the ruined walls that had once been some kind of cremation site. “We’re here. What do you want from us?”
The kid looked at him for a few seconds before disappearing. Dean looked around, thinking that he was going to see the ghost someplace else, urging them to go on. Instead, the large furnaces all came to life at once.
“Whoa!”
The exclamation had little to do with awe and all to do with blast of heat that hit both Winchesters straight on, almost knocking them off their feet.
As fast and furious as the blast of fire had hit them, it vanished without even a trace of burned wood in its wake.
“Okay,” Sam let out, very consciously slowly his breathing to a more normal pattern. “That was... different.”
“No shit,” Dean whispered, feeling as shaken up as his brother looked. Taking a deep breath, he moved closer to the furnace in the middle.
“What the hell are you doing?” Sam called to him, looking at Dean like he’d completely lost his mind.
Dean was almost inclined to agree with him. “I just wanna check something out.”
“In the giant furnace that was active just seconds ago?”
“Remember the first ghost we encountered?” Dean answered, ignoring the level of sarcasm that was dripping from Sam’s words.
“The one who took out our fire?”
Dean nodded. “She said not to burn. At the time, I figured she was talking about her own bones, but now...”
“You think she meant this.”
Very much aware that if the kid’s ghost decided to give those furnaces a repeat performance he would be quite literally toast, Dean carefully moved forward.
When he touched the metal door of the furnace, Dean half expected it to be hot. Instead, his fingers met a cold and still somewhat wet surface. Opening it, Dean peeked inside.
There were remains of burned paper piled in the round space, perfectly preserved as if whoever had tossed them there had done so just a few hours before. Dean could still smell the acrid fumes of burned paper.
Pushing around the fragile fragments with the tip of the knife in his hands, Dan felt the blade hit something hard. The sound was different, metal like the rest of the furnace, but thicker.
After pocketing the knife, Dean reached inside. There was a large box hidden beneath the rest of the debris. Finding it too heavy to lift with just one hand, Dean reached with both to pull it out.
It was in that precise moment that the furnace decided to come to life once again.
The presence of fire was so sudden and solid that Dean wasted half a second staring, watching in morbid fascination as the flames engulfed his arms like hungry wolves. The heat came next, so intense and deep that even Dean’s scream burned inside his throat, unable to escape his lips.
He dropped the box in haste, watching detachedly as it fell to ground and bounced once before his body lost all strength.
He burning alive, slowly being consumed by the fire. The smell of roasting pig was so overwhelming that Dean almost puked.
Sam, who should’ve been helping him, was just standing there, looking bored.
It was Sam’s lack of reaction that made Dean pause, swallow the mind-numbing pain and look at his charcoal arms. He almost screamed anew as he saw the perfectly healthy skin, without a trace of burns.
It had happened again. Right in front of Sam.
“Humm... what are you doing, Dean?”
Dean felt silly and ashamed, sitting on the dirt like a five year old that’d just discovered the wonders of mud. “Found something,” he covered, lamely, as his fingers reached for the fallen box. He half expected it to feel hot when touched.
The sight of the black metal box in Dean’s hands, however, was enough to divert Sam’s interest. “What’s that?”
Dean resisted the urge to say ‘a box’. There was a lock in the front, surprisingly sturdy after all the years it had been left hidden inside that furnace. Looking around, Dean quickly found a rock that suited his needs. “Hand me that, will ya?”
Time had eroded most of the resistance the lock could’ve offered to the two sharp thwacks that Dean delivered.
With Sam’s presence, looming over his shoulder, Dean pushed the lid open. They had no idea what could possibly be inside, but it was fair to guess that it was something important. There weren’t that many things that urged ghosts to go out of their way to help errant humans.
There were four files inside the box. Brown folders, faded with age, with handwritten papers filed inside that looked so fragile Dean feared they might disintegrate as soon as he touched them.
“Well,” he paused, letting the disappointment flash clear on his face. “That’s helpful.”
Sam, apparently more hopeful than Dean was feeling at the moment, picked the first one. “William Bowe, age twenty three,” Sam read, eyes skimming through the text filled page. “Says here he was tested for the presence of ‘gemmules’ and, when none were found, he was transfused with the blood of a Jack Bowe.”
“What the hell is a gemmule?” Dean asked as he opened a second file. “Martin Bowe… thirty. They were looking for the same thing in his blood.”
“I’ve never heard of it before. Whatever it is, it might be called something different now. Or not exist at all,” Sam pointed out, his eyes never lifting from the text on the pages. “Humm… I guess the rumors Michael heard were. This thing was written over a hundred and fifty years ago, well before there was even a hospital here.”
“Well, whatever those gemmules things were, they were supposed to be in their blood. They all died from lack of it,” Dean pointed out. “Also, I think they were all related to each other.”
Catching Sam’s inquisitive look over the rim of the file he was reading, Dean showed him the third and fourth files. “They were all named Bowe. I’d say brothers or cousins, from the close ages. Jack, Jim, William and Mart-”
Dean stopped, looking back at the first file he’d picked up. Like the others, the first page had an old, black and white and faded picture of the patient in question. Martin Bowe’s black eyes in the picture were looking straight at him, defiant even on paper. “The touchy ghost...”
“What about her?”
“She mentioned a 'Mart' was responsible for the kid’s deaths. Think Mart was short for Martin, as in, Martin Bowe?”
“Well, if I’m reading this right,” Sam let out slowly, flipping one more page. “He had more than enough reason to be pissed off at the world and out for blood. I think the people in this island were doing experiments. On humans.”
Dean twisted his nose, like he’d smelled something foul. “What makes you say that?”
“Found a sort of synopses of the theory they were trying to prove,” Sam went on. “They were trying to find the gemmule responsible for violent behavior. A gene, maybe?” Sam wondered. “Anyway, they used the Bowes because they were brothers, all four of them violent criminals. When they found the gemmules absent, the doctor in charge decided that maybe the quantities in each of them were too small to be detected. “
“Eh,” Dean looked away in disgust. “I don't like where this is going...”
Sam nodded but continued reading. “So, the scientists decided to increase the numbers of what they were looking for by passing the gemmules in the blood from one brother to another. Guess we can call this the dawn of genetics,” he said, the look on his face clearly saying that he’d rather call it something else. Something as nasty as what those ‘scientists’ had been doing in that place.
“And the idiots decided to do that by passing along blood transfusions?” Dean asked, already knowing he wasn’t going to like the answer.
Sam nodded. “Remember, this was way back in the day. They had no idea about blood types. From what I’m reading here, all four of them died shortly after receiving a massive blood transfusion from one of the other three. They developed high fevers, their urine turned red…”
Dean looked sick. “Spare me the details, please.”
“I think they all died of blood poisoning,” Sam said, looking a bit green around the gills himself. With the kind of life they lived, basic blood transfusions had been one of those things that, much to Sam’s annoyance, their father had forced them to learn how to do. Figuring out which of them was compatible with who had been one of the first steps to assure something of the likes he was reading never happened to them.
“That’s a nasty way to go,” Dean whispered, trying to imagine how much worse it would’ve been in the middle of the nineteenth century.
“Nasty enough to turn them into vengeful spirits, wouldn’t you say?”
Dean nodded, even though he didn’t entirely agreed with Sam. Sure, four people of the same family, being used as lab rats and ultimately dying from human stupidity was more than enough to turn them into nasty ghosts. But something inside was telling him that there was more to this than what he was seeing. There had to be something else, or else every hunter in Europe would be dealing with the massive clusterfuck that were the Nazi camps from back in WWII.
“You don’t look convinced,” Sam accused him.
Dean got to his feet, dusting off his hands in the back of his jeans. There had been a time when he could’ve just said to his brother that something was wrong just because his gut told him so. Things didn’t work like that anymore. “Does it say where they were buried?” he simply asked.
Sam gave the papers another look. “Not really. I’m guessing the graveyard we found earlier?”
“Lead the way.”
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