Films About Ghosts (1/4)
It was like a road out of an old movie, the trees curving up and over, blocking out the sky. Like someone was trying to hide the wires and the other actors waiting just out of shot. The headlights barely lit more than a single car-length, just scraping the woods that lined the verge. I probably could have tweaked them, squeezed out a little more juice, but we didn't have the time and this wasn't the place. We were the only car on the road, at least, near as I could tell. I hadn't seen any headlights or taillights, or even road signs to break up the long, monotonous stretch of blacktop. Not even so much as a mailbox in what had to be miles. Might've been nice to know that the whole of everything hadn't been broken down and reduced to a twenty foot stretch of asphalt and a few low hanging branches.
Hell, if a deer jumped in front of us, we were screwed. I was an awesome driver, but even I couldn't react that fast. It wouldn't be a deer, though. Not on this road. Not in this darkness. Winchesters were never that lucky.
Nights on the road like this were meant to be easy, just me and Sam and the road, the wheels of the car carving out our own little piece of the universe. I wanted to relax into it. Sam slept next to me, his head tilted against the corner where the seat gave way to the door, all the muscles in his face relaxed the way they used to, before -- hell, I wasn't even sure when "before" might have existed. A long time ago. Too long.
I'd miss that, but I couldn't remember ever feeling it, myself.
My shoulders twitched, the muscles in my back pulling tighter and tighter the longer I drove. I had to work to keep my fingers from clenching too hard on the wheel. It wasn't just the claustrophobia of the tiny, unfamiliar car with its crappy headlights. There was something following us. Not even following, just behind, lurking just past the line of the seat. The weight of it pressed down on my lungs, set the nape of my neck on fire. I twisted my head, nearly swerving right off the road trying to find whatever it was, but I couldn't see anything there.
The feeling wouldn't go away. I clenched my teeth, shooting glances at Sam, each time expecting to see something staring back, crouching in the seat well or just glaring through the window. A djinn, maybe, or a demon. Or something older. Darker. With enormous teeth and thick, black blood.
Compared to the leviathans, demons were almost cuddly.
Between them and Lucifer, Sam and I had our hands full. That was why I was here, after all. Sam had already had to defeat Lucifer on his own, once. I wasn't about to make him do it again.
The few open spaces in the car were too open now, vulnerable spots waiting to be filled by anything able to slip through the cracks. I'd been hunting too long to ignore it, and my fingers itched for the feel of a weapon. This time I pulled over, twisting around to glare into the backseat, but all I could see was the same old worn leather, that stretch of black that when we were little seemed to go on forever.
Sam stirred, mumbled "are we there yet?" like he was fucking five years old before he managed to pull himself together. "Dean? Hey." He touched my shoulder and I managed not to flinch. "What’s up?"
We'd agreed on no more "Are you okay?"s. That "Are you okay?" was the stupidest question we could ask each other. So Sam asked "What’s up?" instead.
I turned back around, flopping into my seat, hands clenching on the wheel so hard I worried I was going to break it. "Nothing."
"Nothing," was the new "I’m fine." The only thing that changed about our conversations were the words.
I restarted the car and pulled carefully back onto the road. It was fucking dark out, and I wasn't about to get into a wreck doing something stupid. The feeling of being watched had dissipated. I wasn't dumb enough to think it was gone for good.
Sam had gone quiet again in the passenger seat, though a quick glance showed he hadn't gone back to sleep. He slouched down, his long limbs sprawled as far as they could go into the seat well, and he still looked like he had his knees wedged up under his chin.
"You couldn't have landed us a bigger ride?" I asked.
"All the cars are too small," he muttered, then stretched up and back, reaching into the backseat. I nearly swore, half-expecting him to pull back a bloody stump instead of his own hand, but he sat back down with a flashlight and a book, none the worse for wear.
"So, what?" I asked. "You not talking to me or something?"
Sam snorted and slouched even deeper into his seat, propping the flashlight on his shoulder so he could hold the book up in front of his face. I looked over, managing to make out a balding man on the cover wearing thick, round glasses. "Fuck, is that Freud?"
Another grunt, another slouch. It looked like the seat was trying to eat Sam.
My scalp prickled, and I regretted the image.
"Look," I said. "Can we just -- can we skip to the part where you call me an idiot for whatever I did and then we go back to doing our normal thing?"
Sam lowered the book an inch and peered over it at me. "Skip what?"
"The leaving in a huff thing."
The book came back up. "I'm not going to leave."
"Bull." I wanted to snatch the book out of his hands, but couldn't bring myself to take either hand off the wheel. "You always leave."
Sam didn't try to deny it. "I always come back."
"So far." I licked my lips and drummed my fingers on the wheel for a few moments, peering out into the darkness past the windshield, looking for a sign, a landmark, anything but trees and yellow lines. "Where the fuck are we going, anyway?" I asked, not so much because I needed an answer as to hear myself talk. When Sam didn't answer, I looked over. "Hey. Give me a break, here. It's not like I know where I'm going."
The book lowered again. "And I do?"
"Well yeah, we're in your --" I cut out when I glanced over again. The passenger seat was empty. The sense of something lurking had vanished, too. "Sam?"
Like an idiot, I twisted to check the backseat again, like I could have missed him climbing his way past me. It was like a prairie back there, a vast expanse of open nothingness.
"See?" I said to the empty car. "I fucking told you." After some debate, I pulled the car into a tight u-turn, letting the tires scrabble on the verge. The way back looked exactly like the way forward, down to the last leaf. "Here we go again."
*
It would've helped if I'd had the least goddamn clue where I was going. That was Sam's job, though, and he was total crap about it. When he wasn't hiding or bitching, he was gone completely. It shouldn't have surprised me. I knew I couldn't count on him, not in here, where everything got all jumbled up, where all the memories and issues and fears hung out together, getting ideas and breeding new issues and fears. Counting on Sam was second nature, though, even when half the time I couldn't be sure if he was talking to me or his imaginary friend the Devil. It was going to be a hard habit to break.
Besides, it wasn't like I had anyone else around to count on.
That was why I was here, though. It was why I was driving this car with its bad headlights and its infinite backseat through a forest that only existed in twenty-foot stretches at a time.
I wanted my brother to stop going away.
I swallowed and sucked on my teeth. There was an odd taste lingering in the back of my throat, like bitter, muddy ass-tea. My fingers itched for the feel of a bottle or a flask, and I reached into my jacket, but there was nothing there. I stretched out my arm, shooting a quick glance towards the back seat. I'd have a bottle of something in my bag. I always had a bottle of something in my bag.
I still wasn't sure I'd get my hand back in once piece if I tried reaching for it, though.
Something flashed by the side of the road on my left, catching the headlights just long enough to draw my attention. I looked, but whatever it was must have gone past already.
"Just some animal," I told myself, though I knew it wasn't.
I kept the car steady, straddling the dashed yellow and tried again to relax. The road didn't even curve, just spooled by, smoother than any road through nowhere had a right to be. I got the feeling I wasn't moving at all, just spinning my wheels on some kind of road-shaped treadmill, killing time while Sam did whatever it was he did when I wasn't looking right at him.
Another flicker to my left, and then a soft thunk on the roof over the backseat. It felt like the air in the car had been electrified. I wondered what I'd find if I switched on the EMF meter, but it was back in my bag, along with my whiskey.
"Fuck off," I told whatever it was. "I'm not in the fucking mood."
The flicker came on the right, this time, and for just a moment I saw someone crouching down just past the reach of the headlights, his head bowed. He looked up and snarled as I passed, and I couldn't hold back a shudder. The light had caught Gordon Walker just long enough to show his bloodshot eyes and his wicked, jutting fangs.
Those teeth were the creepiest things I'd ever seen, right up until the moment I first really saw a leviathan.
Gordon vanished again into the dark in the rearview mirror. That was the thing with roads, after all. You were always leaving something behind.
*
I couldn't tell you how long I had to backtrack. The clock in the dash had stopped God knew how long ago, stuck at 7:30, and I couldn't make out the moon or stars through the branches of the trees. Even the gas gauge was only loosely based on reality, wavering up and down like a drunk no matter how many dashed lines passed under the tires. I spun the dial on the radio a few times, but none of it was any good without Sam sitting next to me. The wail of the guitar always turned into the wail of souls through the crunch of static. It gave me something to do, though. Something to focus on other than the empty seat next to me, the endless road in front, and the giant steaming pile of crap that was always behind me.
-- Caucasian male, the radio hissed. Completely unresponsive.
Vitals?
Steady.
A hand, too small to be Sam's, slipped out and switched the radio off. I glanced over and bit back a groan. Amy sat bolt upright in the passenger seat, staring out the windshield.
"Great." I smirked, turning back to the road myself. "You're not really the company I was hoping for."
"I'm not exactly thrilled to see you, either."
I wanted to ask what she was doing here, but the words slipped away from my tongue. There was a more important question anyway. "Where's Sam?"
"Why did you kill me?"
I glanced over. She hadn't moved. "I asked you first."
Her head turned, the movement stiff and somehow unnatural. "Why did you kill me?" she asked again.
"You already know the answer to that."
She turned her head back to look out the windshield. "There you go, then."
"Fuck you." I twisted my hand on the wheel, feeling its ridges slip between my fingers. "Sam's not running because I killed you."
"I was his first kiss, you know that?"
Shit.
"Who was your first kiss, Dean? Do you even remember?"
I didn't. I knew I should, but her face, her name, they were lost in the sea of all the others. "We're not here to talk about me."
"Why are you here?"
"I'm looking for Sam. Now, you going to help me? Or are you just here to creep my shit out?"
She didn't answer. When I looked over, the passenger seat was empty again.
*
It wasn't too long after that that the flames started to wick up around the seat wells. I grit my teeth. I wasn't surprised, not really. I was never surprised by fire any more. Fire was just a fact of my life, right up there with booze and motels and the never-ending road. The heat scoured off my leg hair and toasted my jeans, but I kept my foot pressed into the accelerator, flicking glance after glance at the passenger seat. This was a good sign, I told myself. I had to be getting close.
The flames climbed up the seat, devouring the leather and clinging to my skin. They slashed across my chest like a seat belt and sent fingers up through my hair. The pain of it was so familiar I nearly sobbed, but I kept my hands clenched on the wheel, my eyes glued to the road -- what little I could make out of it through the growing smoke. When it got to be too much, I started to scream, a breathless, gasping, useless noise, little more than an exhale through heat-ravaged vocal cords. But I kept driving. I'd gotten really good at just working through the pain. The pain was even more constant than the fire.
Alastair landing on the hood of the car fucked my shit up, though. I wasn't expecting that.
His white eyes flashed like teeth and as he reached for me through the windshield, I discovered I wasn't too far gone for a proper scream, after all.
*
I finished screaming about when his fingers swiped through the flames across my chest. Screams were okay. Sometimes I had to scream. The trick was to get it over with and get on with things.
Things in this case being getting Alastair the fuck off the car.
I wrenched the wheel around, sending the car into a spin. If I'd been in the Impala, it would have been as easy as breathing -- easier, even, breathing wasn't always as simple as it was cracked up to be -- but the piece of crap didn't respond the same way, didn't inhabit its own frame the way the Impala did.
It wasn't an extension of the rest of me.
As it was, I had to wrap both hands around the wheel, lean hard into the spin, and take my eyes off the grinning fiend on the hood to check the back end and make sure it wasn't about to land itself in a tree. The car spun fast and hard, its small frame drawing itself in and up like a figure skater. Alastair fought to keep his grip, dragging himself forward until his teeth were the only things I could see, but even he couldn't hold on against the damned whirligig the car had turned into. His eyes went wide as he flew off, his mouth opening in a tight little "O", and I almost laughed. But only almost.
The car settled again once he'd vanished past the trees, and as I sat there, gasping for breath, trying to reign in the dizziness, I reached out a hand to pat the dashboard. "Thanks." Just because it wasn't my baby didn't mean it hadn't done me a huge favor.
The flames were gone, blown out by the spin -- or more likely just gone, switched off like burners on a gas stove -- but the pain still lingered, a tingle across my legs and chest. I stumbled out of the car, coughing and panting as I scanned the trees that wrapped around on all sides. The road went no further from this perspective than when I was in the car, stretching out only twenty feet or so on either side before vanishing into the darkness.
"Dammit, Sam!" I called, turning in place and staring up into the branches overhead. "What the fuck, man?"
A wicked laugh echoed across the small asphalt clearing as though the trees were stone instead of wood. I spun again, looking for the source and wondering if it was the same thing that had lurked in the car, but all I could see were the trees and the road and the car and Sam, standing silhouetted in the headlights, his head bowed forward so his hair dangled down over his face. I startled back, my hands coming up in front of me defensively, and I redirected them to my head to run them through my hair, hoping he didn't notice the momentary freak out.
"Cousin It," I said. "So nice of you to join us again."
Sam sighed. Or maybe the trees did. His hands were shoved into the pockets of his jeans, which were as dark and drenched as the rest of him. I wondered what he'd been swimming in.
"Look man," I said, throwing words into the silence that followed his sigh and hoping they'd stick. "You've gotta help me out here, okay? It's not like I've got a road map or anything."
Sam turned his head away, the ends of his hair swaying without revealing any of his face.
"Yeah. This Ring look of yours?" I stepped forward, reaching out a hand to brush that hair off his face. "Not your best. Now come on, let's --"
Sam's head snapped back around just before my hand reached him, and the image suddenly hit me of Meg-in-Sam snarling, eyes black in the steam of the holy water bath she was receiving.
That wasn't right, though. This Sam's eyes were white, not black.
I hissed, snatching my hand away and backing up. Sam reached up to push his own hair back, half-sneering, half-smiling.
"I was down there a long time, Dean."
"No." My hand came up, shaking, torn between reaching out to him and warning him back. "Not that long."
"Longer than you were." Sam tilted his head. "How long did it take you to break again?" His smile reached full grin now, as something too thick to be water started to drip off his hair, his shirt, his fingers. "I was there more than four times that long."
"This isn't --"
"You're right about one thing, though." Sam tilted his head cheerfully. "They didn't break me. Thanks to Azazel, they never had to."
"No." I backed up this time, trying to keep my feet out of the rapidly spreading pool splashing out from where Sam stood. It curled up into waves at the edges.
"Where do bad folks go when they die?" Sam crooned. He lifted his hand and snapped his fingers. I half expected the car to rise up where it stood behind him and change shape like a Transformer -- Sam had been fascinated with those as a kid -- but instead he just threw me back, sending me through the air like any other demon or monster would. I crashed down against the roots of one of the trees, and they leaped up before I could move, wrapping over my wrists, my ankles, my neck, holding me immobile. Sam strode out across the pool flowing down from his hair, his bare feet barely making a ripple on its surface, though it churned against the cracks and potholes in the street. He stopped at the edge of the pool, where it brushed against the bank of the verge not far from my feet.
"Don't look so surprised, Dean." He leaned forward, looming over where I lay prone as more and more roots erupted from the dirt, wrapping in layers now across my body, dragging downward as though the forest were trying to eat me alive. "We both knew it'd come to this eventually."
I opened my mouth -- to yell, to object, hell, maybe just to beg -- only to gag when one of the roots made its way past my teeth, coating my tongue with the taste of dirt and dust and blood. It widened as it grew, forcing my mouth wide and my head back, thrusting its way down my throat.
"I've got a treat for you," Sam said, and when he smiled this time, I could see the other Sams, the Sams he used to be, reflected in the expression, save for those cold, blank white eyes. "See you on the flip side."
The roots looped over my nose, cutting off my air. The dirt roiled like a living thing, piling up over my cheeks and into my ears, muffling the sound of Sam's laugh. I remembered this, though last time I'd been going the other way, clawing my way up instead of being dragged under. The dirt pressed cold against my skin, squeezing tighter and tighter, and the last thing I saw before it swamped up over my eyes was a second shadow emerging in the light of the headlights, looming up behind Sam.
*
I expected to open my eyes to Hell, or maybe that damned pine box I thought I'd escaped so many years ago. I thought maybe, maybe I'd luck out, and I'd open them to some crappy, stained plaster ceiling in some crappy, run down motel room.
Instead, I opened them to feathers.
They were as dark and damp as Sam's hair had been, stuck together into tight clumps, but they were everywhere, wrapped around me like a cocoon. I lay in a half-fetal position, floating on nothing at all.
I felt . . . safe.
It wasn't a familiar feeling.
I took I don't know how long, just curled there, trying to think past hiseyeswerewhitehiseyeswherewhite and nononotburiednotagain and getting stuck over and over, the terror still lodged deep in my chest.
"What's up?"
"Nothing."
I heaved in a breath, and when I got more than halfway through the inhale without falling apart, I tried it again. When my heart slowly settled and my muscles uncramped, I reached out, running my fingers over the feathers and then slipping them through. The feathers parted like a curtain, and a figure stared in at me. His eyes were so vibrantly blue against the darkness that it hurt to look at them, but I couldn't bring myself to look away.
"This isn't right, Dean," Castiel said. "Stop it."
And the feathers dropped, flowing away and vanishing into the liquid darkness as I broke the surface and sucked in a hard, painful gasp.
*
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