Clowntime is Over
Title: Clowntime is Over
Fandom: Supernatural
Author: tikific
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Dean/Cas, Sam
Warnings: Cursing. Spoilers up through S8.
Word Count: 4,300
Summary: Dean and Cas pursue a Northwest legend in an abandoned amusement park. Sam is not amused.
Notes: I probably follow too many abandoned places blogs, but so what. This take place in the same universe as Generator and Save Rite. You can read those too. Or not.
“I can’t do this, Dean.”
Dean Winchester set hands to hips and surveyed his surroundings. They stood in a weed-eaten parking lot just outside the once grand entryway of a long abandoned amusement park.
Dean cast a glance at his recalcitrant baby brother. “Sammy. You can do this.”
With a grimace, Sam forced himself to look upwards. The broken face of a weathered fiberglass clown, raised up several stories high and setting astride a yellow archway, glared down upon him, mocking him.
“This is Clownland Family Fun Center, Sammy. There are gonna be clowns.”
“Dean.” It was a rare instance when the younger Winchester was at loss for words. “There are things I can do. And things I can’t do. And of the things I can’t do … this is a thing.” Clearly, Stanford had not prepared him for this eventuality.
“Man, you gotta suck it up.”
Sam stifled a cough that had been stuck in his throat now for a good ten minutes. “What I need very badly now is to go somewhere and hork up those blueberry pancakes you made me eat for breakfast.”
“Sam-“
“Dean.” The voice was quiet but insistent. Dean reluctantly turned to meet the eyes of the absolutely and utterly dead serious ex-angel. “We will handle this. You and I.”
But Dean decided to give it one more go. “Sam. Come on, dude. This is it! This is him!”
The cough edged out in a hoarse laugh. “Like I told you, this is not him. Bigfoot, if he ever existed, is not retired and living in Clownland!”
“So if it ain’t Sasquatch, what the hell is it?”
“I dunno. A bear? Or a really big dog?”
Dean was moved to snort in derision. Because, seriously. “Bigfoot is a Labrador? That’s what’s been eating local teenagers and dumping their bones in the sea?”
“I said it could be a bear. Or maybe a gorilla?” Sam winced, regretting the words as soon as they flew free.
“A gorilla. In Washington State. Is this a rain gorilla?”
“Dean.”
“Hey, maybe it’s part tree octopus. Have you considered that? Octo-monkey!” Dean waved his hands in front of Sam in a rough approximation of tentacles.
“The being commonly known as Bigfoot died in the Mt. St. Helen’s eruption,” Cas interjected.
“What?” said Dean, who ceased his writhing to turn on Cas. “And how the hell do you know that?”
Cas puffed up as if he were about to break out the wings. “No living being could have survived that blast.” His look darkened. “Now, Dean. Shall we go?”
The human shard that remained of the once celestial being inclined his head, and Dean scowled. When Metatron snatched Cas’s grace he must have left behind all the cussedness. Damn was this guy stubborn sometimes. “Sam….”
“I’ll just go sit in the car and have a quiet nervous breakdown,” Sam assured them. He looked back up at the ghastly entryway and shuddered. “Though I might move it back. Out of sight. Like … fuck.”
Dean huffed to signal big brotherly impatience and dug the car keys out from among the lint in his pocket. He lobbed them at Sam and turned to go. “Come on. Let’s get this over with,” he told Cas, who nodded solemnly to Sam and then followed along, under the archway and into the bowels of Clownland.
Sam felt his stomach lurch again, and wondered idly exactly how furious Dean would be if he filled the Impala with blueberry pancake splatter.
“This is an amusement park.”
It was statement, not a question, but Dean answered anyway. “Was an amusement park. Until they figured it was built over a sewer line. A leaking sewer line.”
“What characteristics do you find to be amusing, Dean?”
They were standing in the shadow of the rusted remains of what had been a giant Ferris wheel. Dean stifled the small pit of panic arising in his gut and looked away. There was a huge fiberglass clown face grinning at them from the central hub, and the individual cars were all painted up so you looked like you were riding in the jaws of a clown. A Ferris wheel constructed from the remains of beheaded clowns? Dean shook his head, chasing away the thought. “I dunno. Just amusing in general I guess. You know. You’d bring the kids, go on rides.”
“You would go on that ride, Dean?” Cas pointed upwards, which was exactly the direction Dean didn’t want to look.
“Oh, fuck no. But, you know, rides. Cotton candy. Fun.”
“I had thought you found heights to be unpleasant?”
“I hate heights. You know that.”
“So, you wouldn’t consider a ride on this mechanism to be amusing?”
“What, the creepy clown skull Ferris wheel? No, I’d find it to be a shit-my-pants kind of situation.”
“Hrm.”
“How about this, Cas? How about we pursue our furry friend and leave the explanations of why humans are weird for later?”
“You mean to follow the cryptid’s trail?”
That caught Dean short. “What trail?”
Cas crouched down, trailing a long finger on the ground. “These tracks are too large to have been made by a human.”
“That’s a track?” Dean hunkered down beside Cas, staring intently at the patch he was indicating. “I guess it does sort of look like a footprint, now you mention it. Oh, wait!” He turned his attention to Cas. “The Men of Letters library. This is what you were studying.”
Cas’s face was tilted in a way Dean wouldn’t have been able to see the smile, but he saw his shoulders straighten a fraction. The little guy was pleased with himself. “The trail would seem to go off in this direction.” Cas pointed to indicate a path heading more or less towards the nearby seashore. “But I have a reservation about this enterprise.”
“I guess I’m the complaints department. What’s your beef?”
“According to my survey of the literature, Sasquatch was alleged to be a shy and peaceful creature.”
“Yeah, well, Metatron was supposed to be our buddy.” Dean knew even before he’d finished speaking that he’d fucked up. Cas straightened up and caught his breath. “Hey. I’m sorry. I’m a dick. Cas? Look at me, man.” But Cas was staring off in another direction, his breath suddenly gone a little ragged.
Dean reached over and put a hand on the back of the other man’s head, gently drawing him forward until their foreheads were almost touching. “Look at me, okay? Focus. We’re gonna go get Bigfoot now, and we’re gonna kick his big ass. Right? Or we’ll gank the big dog. Or big octo-bear. Or whatever the fuck.”
“Octo-bear?”
“Octo-bear. It’s funny. It’s hilarious!” Dean hopped back and roared while flapping his arms in a cephalopodian manner. Cas did the curious puppy head-tilt thing, but at least he wasn’t sobbing with some kind of existential despair. “All right? So, let’s get tracking.”
“These tracks … are feet. Not pseudopodia.”
“Good. Follow the feet!”
“I’m not useless.”
Sam rested his head on the Impala’s steering wheel. He had just backed the beast far enough away in the cracked, rutted and weed-strewn old parking lot so he could no longer see the looming clown head that was fated to haunt his dreams. And then, upon finishing the maneuver, although he hadn’t vomited, he had gone into a small coughing fit, which, though not terribly debilitating, had succeeded in taking a good sized bite out of what was left of his ego.
“I am not useless,” Sam repeated, glancing over to floor beside him. One of his many overdue library books had popped out from underneath the passenger seat when the car had hit a not terribly well marked speed bump. He hoped to God he hadn’t fucked up something with the suspension, because sick or not, Dean would have his head on a platter if baby incurred any harm.
He scooped up the book, a crappy trade paperback emblazoned, Crypto! Real Modern Day Monsters of the Pacific Northwest. And, yes, it actually had an exclamation point in the title. He opened it up to the page on Clownland, which was faced by a really horrible photograph of a ginormous fiberglass clown. “I am not useless,” he muttered. “Exclamation point.”
Well, this figures, Dean thought to himself. Cas’s dubious Bigfoot trail had wandered through the park, past innumerable weathered effigies of painted-faced harlequins, and they had arrived at the coast, near the notorious effluent pipe through which raw sewage from the surrounding coastal towns was pumped into the ocean.
The aroma was definitely distinctive. The sludge oozed from the end of the pipe and fell into a muddy, stinking ditch. The ditch canted downwards, and then the sewage abruptly spilled off the cliff out into the sea some … well, Dean didn't exactly want to think about how far below.
“Would you have found this ride amusing, Dean?”
Dean blinked up at the rusting, broken down roller coaster looming behind them. It had a loop. God help them, a genuine 360 degree loop. “That thing? No way.”
Cas was giving him the baffled angel-puppy look again. It was time to reorient things back to reality. “So, what do you think is the best way to kill this thing?” This had been the subject of a long, fractious debate which began in the Men of Letters bunker and continued throughout the drive, through their check-in at a local hotel, and indeed continued simmering even during their arrival at Clownland. How exactly do you take down a Bigfoot? Dean himself favored silver bullets for no other reason, Sam maintained, than they were cool. Sam, on the other hand, favored a pointed wooden stake, as he reasoned the thing might have some commonality with a local pagan god.
Cas, to Dean's annoyance, agreed equally with both of them. Although when pressed, he turned out to favor beheading the creature, as, he suggested, god or beast, it wouldn't get far without its head. To which Dean was forced to agree. So Dean had packed along a revolver and one of Sammy's wooden stakes, and Cas had his favorite knife, a real nasty thing he'd been using to gank vampires. Since losing his grace Cas had become something of a knife freak, which made Dean terribly proud.
“I suppose we will have to see what works,” said Cas.
“That means don't bother with the wooden stake?” prompted Dean.
Cas scrunched up his eyes. “I think there is actually a slightly better argument in favor of the wooden stake than the silver bullets.”
“Wait. Really?” This sounded like treason.
“But I think beheading will prove to be the correct methodology.” Cas had the knife out and was running a thumb along the edge. It was kind of hot, actually, and Dean found himself halfway regretting that Clownland's old Tunnel of Love ride currently looked like it had become the place the drunk college kids went to relieve themselves, because he was suddenly contemplating activities that involved him sticking his tongue as far as it could go down Castiel's throat.
“What was that?”
“What was what?” asked Dean, suddenly emerging from his reverie. Cas pointed the knife blade at the rusted out hulk of the awful clown-themed roller coaster.
Dean stared. It was nothing. No, what was that? A shadow? A really big shadow?
No.
He nodded silently to Cas. They approached the roller coaster and carefully entered through a gaping hole in the rust-stained chain link fence. Dean shivered. Even though the coaster had obviously been shut down for decades, one look up at the terrible hill climbs and the loop-the-loop brought back painful memories of being coerced into riding one of the cursed things. He would rather go against a nest of vampires with a butter knife than brave one of those beasts again.
Cas was signaling for him to stop. It was silly, really. In all probability, the shadow was probably just some homeless dude hoping to bed down for the night. He was going to say something, but Cas clapped a hand over his mouth and motioned for silence.
This was a little bit hot, too. Dean wondered if he needed to give the Tunnel of Love another once over.
And then he heard the rustling.
Without a word, both men spun around, weapons raised.
“Sasquatch” was one of Sammy's nicknames. Even diminished by his illness Sam was a big guy: there was no denying that.
But this thing? It was like a fur-covered brick fucking wall that had gotten up to move. And now it was towering over them, tall as a hill climb and disorienting as a loop-the-loop.
Cas did that utterly stupid guardian angel thing where he went to shove in front. Dean grasped the back of his shirt and pulled them both back a step.
Then he raised his firearm and emptied it into the chest area. Six silver bullets.
This made it angry.
Roaring and bleeding, it swiped an immense paw at Cas and Dean. Cas hit the deck in time, but Dean was a little slow and got caught by the backhand, the gun flying from his hands. He cursed. The beast started to charge him, but there was a cry, and to Dean's amazement, Cas leapt up on its back, shouting and valiantly trying to stab it in the neck. But it looked like the time Dean had tried to stab Sammy with that stupid movie prop knife: it completely failed to penetrate the thick fur.
Dean grabbed Sam’s wooden stake, as there was nothing else left to do. Cas wriggled around, trying to keep purchase, and somehow managed to put the knife into the creature's eye.
The creature wailed in pain and then took off blindly running, seeping blood, Cas still clinging to its neck. Dean raced behind, clutching the stake, as it slammed into the chain link fence and wrenched down an entire section as it passed. It fled towards the sea, and Dean spent a horrible moment terrified that it was going off the cliff along with Cas. But then it took a bad step and stumbled down into the sewage pipe ditch instead.
Dean reached the edge of the ditch where now both Cas and Sasquatch lay, covered in the disgusting brownish sludge. The beast was moving, rousing, but Cas was not. It raised itself again on its hind legs, crazed with pain, and reared back to strike.
“Cas! No!”
The book was actually quite good. Sam had read it cover to cover a number of times now. The author wasn't a hunter, but he had obviously put a lot of effort into checking historical records. The Bigfoot chapter skimmed over the well-known basics, and gained Sam's esteem by dismissing the laughable video footage as an obvious hoax.
Sam was re-reading the section on Clownland, which had sparked their current visit. Although it didn't technically fall under the rubric of a mysterious monster, the park had been rumored to be haunted almost since the time of it was shut down by state authorities, some decades past. There were conflicting reports that the owner himself had alerted authorities to the errant sewer line, although his motivation remained elusive: the park was not insured, so it couldn’t be argued he was going for a payoff.
As Sam read through the collected anecdotes, he began to reflect that they did not really add up to what he knew about vengeful spirits so much as something else. Something was tickling at the edge of his consciousness....
And then something else was tickling. Sam sneezed. And then he opened the glove compartment, grasping for another Kleenex. Instead, he grabbed the frayed old map of the park he gotten from somewhere. He took it out and carefully unfolded it, peering at the park's odd layout. Although it abutted the coastline, it didn't make the best use of the property: it was instead roughly circular in design, and divided into six more or less equal sections, five along the perimeter, and the great Ferris wheel smack in the middle like the hub on a wheel. Sam chuckled, remembering suckering Dean into riding one of those things when he'd been a teenager. It was probably a cruel trick, knowing his brother's terror of heights, but nothing that Dean wouldn't have played on Sam.
He smiled ruefully at the memory, and noticed that, oddly enough, the section of the park containing the Ferris wheel was not circular, but rather five-sided, roughly the shape of a pentagram. Well, it just went to prove, clown were fucking evil.
Sam frowned. He rummaged in the glove compartment again and grabbed a pencil. He traced some lines onto the park map. That's why it looked so familiar. The park had been laid out like a giant devil's trap.
But why would...?
And then it all came together.
Sam was out of the car, running hard.
“Dean! Cas!”
Dean was hanging by a thread.
The trouble was, there were no threads.
He had managed to knock Bigfoot off of Cas by being a complete idiot and jumping into the sewer pit along with them, but then the monster had regained its senses and hurled him down in the direction of the cliff. He was within a couple feet of the edge now, pushing against the steady current of the oozing sludge.
“Cas!” he screamed.
There was nothing to hang on to, and the bottom was literally as slick as shit, and it kept sloping more and more downwards the closer you got to the edge, and Dean was fucking close to the edge right now. He scrambled for a handhold, and only slipped further down.
“CAS!”
Cas, who had now roused, was trying to use the wooden stake Dean had dropped, but it was about as effective as a toothpick on a grizzly bear. And this thing was three times bigger and about twelve times angrier than any grizzly bear. Bigfoot swung a paw, missing Cas, but shattering the stake.
Dean felt a foot slip over the edge. “Cas. Hurry!”
Bigfoot lunged to take a large bite out of Cas. By some uncanny stroke of luck, Cas managed to lodge a piece the broken stick into the thing's open mouth, sticking its jaws open. It flailed, frustrated. Cas turned and waded through the sludge to grab Dean's wrist, but then there was the problem that neither of them having anything to hold on to.
Dean heard a snap. Bigfoot had managed to shatter the stick. It squinted, one-eyed and furious at Dean and Cas, and began to slip and stide towards them.
“We're gonna die, right?” Dean asked Cas, who was currently the only thing keeping him from sliding off the cliff.
“That seems likely.”
The huge creature approached, roared, raised a paw....
And then froze.
"Exorcziamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica...”
“Sammy!” shouted Dean.
Bigfoot, looming over them, threw his head back and began to belch out a foul, sulfur-smelling black smoke. After what seemed an eternity, the smoke spun in a spiral, and then dissipated.
As for Bigfoot, he goggled, blinked, and then leaned entirely too far, toppling off the edge. As Dean sqeezed his eyes shut in terror, there was a moment of silence, followed by a giant splash in the water below.
Cas meanwhile had somehow found his footing, and now grasped Dean under the armpits, pulling him clear of the edge.
“What the hell, Sammy,” said Dean.
“I'm not useless!” Sam announced.
Dean looked at Cas. They were both completely coated in the toxic sludge. “No, you're not useless,” he told his brother.
Sam stared down at them. “Phew. You guys smell foul!”
Cas looked like a drowned kitten. He blinked up through dripping bangs, arms clamped over his pale chest.
Sam had found a hose and, miraculously, the park hadn't had its water turned off after all these years. He'd gotten Dean and Cas to strip down to their skivvies, and the had applied some water pressure to the mess, standing well upwind of them.
Dean had toughed out the cold water, but Cas cowered, shivering under the onslaught.
“Tetanus shots. Gamma globulin. Maybe Hep A shots. Cas, you know if your vessel has been vaccinated?”
“I don't know, Sam,” Cas whispered.
“So the park is basically a giant devil's trap?” asked Dean.
“Yeah,” said Sam. “I think the original owner may have planned it for a specific demon. That's why he abandoned it.”
“And then when Bigfoot comes wandering by....”
“The demon switched meatsuits. But he was still unable to leave.”
“Poor beast,” shivered Cas.
Dean slapped him on the back in an encouraging manner. “Hey, dude, don't be so down, you bagged Bigfoot!”
“I can't help but feel he was an innocent party. And now he's dead.”
“We don't know he's dead.”
“Dean,” laughed Sam. “He fell off a cliff.”
“Ah, but you can never be sure, you know. He's like Godzilla!”
“Bigfoot is like Godzilla?”
“I think that's good enough for now,” Dean announced, pointing a drippy hand at the hose.
Sam cranked off the faucet and picked up the ragged towels he'd scavenged from the back of the car. He tossed them over to Dean and Cas, being careful to keep his distance. “You can't keep treating us like we're toxic waste,” Dean protested.
“Sure I can,” said Sam.
“Hey. You notice something, Cas?”
Cas dabbed himself with a towel. “Sam isn't sneezing, Dean.”
“Yeah. What's the deal?”
Sam paused. He tried a cough, but it wasn't very convincing. “I dunno. The adrenaline, maybe?”
“He confronted his fear,” said Cas, brushing water out of his eyes. “Perhaps that is a contributing factor.” Dean laughed and applied his own towel to Cas’s hair. He still had a few kinks with the whole human showering thing.
Sam handed over sets of spare clothing, still standing well back of his toxic buddies. “You think that’s what it is? That’s funny, because Dean had to confront one of his phobias too.”
“What would that be? And, why do these pants say ‘juicy’ on the butt?” asked Dean, regarding the ragged sweat pants Sam had given him.
“I dunno. They were in the trunk. You keep some weird shit in that trunk, you know.”
“You confronted your fear of heights, Dean,” Cas informed him. He looked dubiously at his board shorts Sam had supplied before pulling them on.
“Well, I guess so. Not that I’m getting on a fucking Ferris wheel again any time this century.”
“So what did you confront, Cas?” asked Sam.
“I’m sorry?” And there was the canted head again.
“Hey, yeah, we need some narrative symmetry here,” said Dean.
Sam gawped at Dean. “What?”
“I read!” Dean told him. He turned back to Cas. “What are you afraid of, Cas?”
“Me, most probably,” came a very familiar voice.
Dean felt a chill slide down his spine. “Death,” he said to the newcomer. “This is … unexpected?”
“Or perhaps he fears a wardrobe malfunction,” quipped Death, tilting up his sunglasses to rest on the top of his head and reaching over to finger the hem of Cas's UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs T shirt. Cas went even more pale than usual.
“So, to what do we owe the pleasure?” asked Sam.
“Yeah, I sort of thought you were done with us, uh, so to speak,” said Dean.
“Due to current circumstances, we have come to possess certain interests in common. I rather think an alliance of sorts might prove to be mutually beneficial.”
“Circumstances?” said Dean.
“And what kind of alliance?” asked Sam.
Cas said nothing at all.
Death's featured settled into a moue. “I find I'm a bit peckish. Would you mind terribly moving this discussion to a venue where food might be available?”
Sam and Dean exchanged a look. “Uh. Sure,” said Dean.
And then the four were there no more.
NEXT
Fandom: Supernatural
Author: tikific
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Dean/Cas, Sam
Warnings: Cursing. Spoilers up through S8.
Word Count: 4,300
Summary: Dean and Cas pursue a Northwest legend in an abandoned amusement park. Sam is not amused.
Notes: I probably follow too many abandoned places blogs, but so what. This take place in the same universe as Generator and Save Rite. You can read those too. Or not.
“I can’t do this, Dean.”
Dean Winchester set hands to hips and surveyed his surroundings. They stood in a weed-eaten parking lot just outside the once grand entryway of a long abandoned amusement park.
Dean cast a glance at his recalcitrant baby brother. “Sammy. You can do this.”
With a grimace, Sam forced himself to look upwards. The broken face of a weathered fiberglass clown, raised up several stories high and setting astride a yellow archway, glared down upon him, mocking him.
“This is Clownland Family Fun Center, Sammy. There are gonna be clowns.”
“Dean.” It was a rare instance when the younger Winchester was at loss for words. “There are things I can do. And things I can’t do. And of the things I can’t do … this is a thing.” Clearly, Stanford had not prepared him for this eventuality.
“Man, you gotta suck it up.”
Sam stifled a cough that had been stuck in his throat now for a good ten minutes. “What I need very badly now is to go somewhere and hork up those blueberry pancakes you made me eat for breakfast.”
“Sam-“
“Dean.” The voice was quiet but insistent. Dean reluctantly turned to meet the eyes of the absolutely and utterly dead serious ex-angel. “We will handle this. You and I.”
But Dean decided to give it one more go. “Sam. Come on, dude. This is it! This is him!”
The cough edged out in a hoarse laugh. “Like I told you, this is not him. Bigfoot, if he ever existed, is not retired and living in Clownland!”
“So if it ain’t Sasquatch, what the hell is it?”
“I dunno. A bear? Or a really big dog?”
Dean was moved to snort in derision. Because, seriously. “Bigfoot is a Labrador? That’s what’s been eating local teenagers and dumping their bones in the sea?”
“I said it could be a bear. Or maybe a gorilla?” Sam winced, regretting the words as soon as they flew free.
“A gorilla. In Washington State. Is this a rain gorilla?”
“Dean.”
“Hey, maybe it’s part tree octopus. Have you considered that? Octo-monkey!” Dean waved his hands in front of Sam in a rough approximation of tentacles.
“The being commonly known as Bigfoot died in the Mt. St. Helen’s eruption,” Cas interjected.
“What?” said Dean, who ceased his writhing to turn on Cas. “And how the hell do you know that?”
Cas puffed up as if he were about to break out the wings. “No living being could have survived that blast.” His look darkened. “Now, Dean. Shall we go?”
The human shard that remained of the once celestial being inclined his head, and Dean scowled. When Metatron snatched Cas’s grace he must have left behind all the cussedness. Damn was this guy stubborn sometimes. “Sam….”
“I’ll just go sit in the car and have a quiet nervous breakdown,” Sam assured them. He looked back up at the ghastly entryway and shuddered. “Though I might move it back. Out of sight. Like … fuck.”
Dean huffed to signal big brotherly impatience and dug the car keys out from among the lint in his pocket. He lobbed them at Sam and turned to go. “Come on. Let’s get this over with,” he told Cas, who nodded solemnly to Sam and then followed along, under the archway and into the bowels of Clownland.
Sam felt his stomach lurch again, and wondered idly exactly how furious Dean would be if he filled the Impala with blueberry pancake splatter.
“This is an amusement park.”
It was statement, not a question, but Dean answered anyway. “Was an amusement park. Until they figured it was built over a sewer line. A leaking sewer line.”
“What characteristics do you find to be amusing, Dean?”
They were standing in the shadow of the rusted remains of what had been a giant Ferris wheel. Dean stifled the small pit of panic arising in his gut and looked away. There was a huge fiberglass clown face grinning at them from the central hub, and the individual cars were all painted up so you looked like you were riding in the jaws of a clown. A Ferris wheel constructed from the remains of beheaded clowns? Dean shook his head, chasing away the thought. “I dunno. Just amusing in general I guess. You know. You’d bring the kids, go on rides.”
“You would go on that ride, Dean?” Cas pointed upwards, which was exactly the direction Dean didn’t want to look.
“Oh, fuck no. But, you know, rides. Cotton candy. Fun.”
“I had thought you found heights to be unpleasant?”
“I hate heights. You know that.”
“So, you wouldn’t consider a ride on this mechanism to be amusing?”
“What, the creepy clown skull Ferris wheel? No, I’d find it to be a shit-my-pants kind of situation.”
“Hrm.”
“How about this, Cas? How about we pursue our furry friend and leave the explanations of why humans are weird for later?”
“You mean to follow the cryptid’s trail?”
That caught Dean short. “What trail?”
Cas crouched down, trailing a long finger on the ground. “These tracks are too large to have been made by a human.”
“That’s a track?” Dean hunkered down beside Cas, staring intently at the patch he was indicating. “I guess it does sort of look like a footprint, now you mention it. Oh, wait!” He turned his attention to Cas. “The Men of Letters library. This is what you were studying.”
Cas’s face was tilted in a way Dean wouldn’t have been able to see the smile, but he saw his shoulders straighten a fraction. The little guy was pleased with himself. “The trail would seem to go off in this direction.” Cas pointed to indicate a path heading more or less towards the nearby seashore. “But I have a reservation about this enterprise.”
“I guess I’m the complaints department. What’s your beef?”
“According to my survey of the literature, Sasquatch was alleged to be a shy and peaceful creature.”
“Yeah, well, Metatron was supposed to be our buddy.” Dean knew even before he’d finished speaking that he’d fucked up. Cas straightened up and caught his breath. “Hey. I’m sorry. I’m a dick. Cas? Look at me, man.” But Cas was staring off in another direction, his breath suddenly gone a little ragged.
Dean reached over and put a hand on the back of the other man’s head, gently drawing him forward until their foreheads were almost touching. “Look at me, okay? Focus. We’re gonna go get Bigfoot now, and we’re gonna kick his big ass. Right? Or we’ll gank the big dog. Or big octo-bear. Or whatever the fuck.”
“Octo-bear?”
“Octo-bear. It’s funny. It’s hilarious!” Dean hopped back and roared while flapping his arms in a cephalopodian manner. Cas did the curious puppy head-tilt thing, but at least he wasn’t sobbing with some kind of existential despair. “All right? So, let’s get tracking.”
“These tracks … are feet. Not pseudopodia.”
“Good. Follow the feet!”
“I’m not useless.”
Sam rested his head on the Impala’s steering wheel. He had just backed the beast far enough away in the cracked, rutted and weed-strewn old parking lot so he could no longer see the looming clown head that was fated to haunt his dreams. And then, upon finishing the maneuver, although he hadn’t vomited, he had gone into a small coughing fit, which, though not terribly debilitating, had succeeded in taking a good sized bite out of what was left of his ego.
“I am not useless,” Sam repeated, glancing over to floor beside him. One of his many overdue library books had popped out from underneath the passenger seat when the car had hit a not terribly well marked speed bump. He hoped to God he hadn’t fucked up something with the suspension, because sick or not, Dean would have his head on a platter if baby incurred any harm.
He scooped up the book, a crappy trade paperback emblazoned, Crypto! Real Modern Day Monsters of the Pacific Northwest. And, yes, it actually had an exclamation point in the title. He opened it up to the page on Clownland, which was faced by a really horrible photograph of a ginormous fiberglass clown. “I am not useless,” he muttered. “Exclamation point.”
Well, this figures, Dean thought to himself. Cas’s dubious Bigfoot trail had wandered through the park, past innumerable weathered effigies of painted-faced harlequins, and they had arrived at the coast, near the notorious effluent pipe through which raw sewage from the surrounding coastal towns was pumped into the ocean.
The aroma was definitely distinctive. The sludge oozed from the end of the pipe and fell into a muddy, stinking ditch. The ditch canted downwards, and then the sewage abruptly spilled off the cliff out into the sea some … well, Dean didn't exactly want to think about how far below.
“Would you have found this ride amusing, Dean?”
Dean blinked up at the rusting, broken down roller coaster looming behind them. It had a loop. God help them, a genuine 360 degree loop. “That thing? No way.”
Cas was giving him the baffled angel-puppy look again. It was time to reorient things back to reality. “So, what do you think is the best way to kill this thing?” This had been the subject of a long, fractious debate which began in the Men of Letters bunker and continued throughout the drive, through their check-in at a local hotel, and indeed continued simmering even during their arrival at Clownland. How exactly do you take down a Bigfoot? Dean himself favored silver bullets for no other reason, Sam maintained, than they were cool. Sam, on the other hand, favored a pointed wooden stake, as he reasoned the thing might have some commonality with a local pagan god.
Cas, to Dean's annoyance, agreed equally with both of them. Although when pressed, he turned out to favor beheading the creature, as, he suggested, god or beast, it wouldn't get far without its head. To which Dean was forced to agree. So Dean had packed along a revolver and one of Sammy's wooden stakes, and Cas had his favorite knife, a real nasty thing he'd been using to gank vampires. Since losing his grace Cas had become something of a knife freak, which made Dean terribly proud.
“I suppose we will have to see what works,” said Cas.
“That means don't bother with the wooden stake?” prompted Dean.
Cas scrunched up his eyes. “I think there is actually a slightly better argument in favor of the wooden stake than the silver bullets.”
“Wait. Really?” This sounded like treason.
“But I think beheading will prove to be the correct methodology.” Cas had the knife out and was running a thumb along the edge. It was kind of hot, actually, and Dean found himself halfway regretting that Clownland's old Tunnel of Love ride currently looked like it had become the place the drunk college kids went to relieve themselves, because he was suddenly contemplating activities that involved him sticking his tongue as far as it could go down Castiel's throat.
“What was that?”
“What was what?” asked Dean, suddenly emerging from his reverie. Cas pointed the knife blade at the rusted out hulk of the awful clown-themed roller coaster.
Dean stared. It was nothing. No, what was that? A shadow? A really big shadow?
No.
He nodded silently to Cas. They approached the roller coaster and carefully entered through a gaping hole in the rust-stained chain link fence. Dean shivered. Even though the coaster had obviously been shut down for decades, one look up at the terrible hill climbs and the loop-the-loop brought back painful memories of being coerced into riding one of the cursed things. He would rather go against a nest of vampires with a butter knife than brave one of those beasts again.
Cas was signaling for him to stop. It was silly, really. In all probability, the shadow was probably just some homeless dude hoping to bed down for the night. He was going to say something, but Cas clapped a hand over his mouth and motioned for silence.
This was a little bit hot, too. Dean wondered if he needed to give the Tunnel of Love another once over.
And then he heard the rustling.
Without a word, both men spun around, weapons raised.
“Sasquatch” was one of Sammy's nicknames. Even diminished by his illness Sam was a big guy: there was no denying that.
But this thing? It was like a fur-covered brick fucking wall that had gotten up to move. And now it was towering over them, tall as a hill climb and disorienting as a loop-the-loop.
Cas did that utterly stupid guardian angel thing where he went to shove in front. Dean grasped the back of his shirt and pulled them both back a step.
Then he raised his firearm and emptied it into the chest area. Six silver bullets.
This made it angry.
Roaring and bleeding, it swiped an immense paw at Cas and Dean. Cas hit the deck in time, but Dean was a little slow and got caught by the backhand, the gun flying from his hands. He cursed. The beast started to charge him, but there was a cry, and to Dean's amazement, Cas leapt up on its back, shouting and valiantly trying to stab it in the neck. But it looked like the time Dean had tried to stab Sammy with that stupid movie prop knife: it completely failed to penetrate the thick fur.
Dean grabbed Sam’s wooden stake, as there was nothing else left to do. Cas wriggled around, trying to keep purchase, and somehow managed to put the knife into the creature's eye.
The creature wailed in pain and then took off blindly running, seeping blood, Cas still clinging to its neck. Dean raced behind, clutching the stake, as it slammed into the chain link fence and wrenched down an entire section as it passed. It fled towards the sea, and Dean spent a horrible moment terrified that it was going off the cliff along with Cas. But then it took a bad step and stumbled down into the sewage pipe ditch instead.
Dean reached the edge of the ditch where now both Cas and Sasquatch lay, covered in the disgusting brownish sludge. The beast was moving, rousing, but Cas was not. It raised itself again on its hind legs, crazed with pain, and reared back to strike.
“Cas! No!”
The book was actually quite good. Sam had read it cover to cover a number of times now. The author wasn't a hunter, but he had obviously put a lot of effort into checking historical records. The Bigfoot chapter skimmed over the well-known basics, and gained Sam's esteem by dismissing the laughable video footage as an obvious hoax.
Sam was re-reading the section on Clownland, which had sparked their current visit. Although it didn't technically fall under the rubric of a mysterious monster, the park had been rumored to be haunted almost since the time of it was shut down by state authorities, some decades past. There were conflicting reports that the owner himself had alerted authorities to the errant sewer line, although his motivation remained elusive: the park was not insured, so it couldn’t be argued he was going for a payoff.
As Sam read through the collected anecdotes, he began to reflect that they did not really add up to what he knew about vengeful spirits so much as something else. Something was tickling at the edge of his consciousness....
And then something else was tickling. Sam sneezed. And then he opened the glove compartment, grasping for another Kleenex. Instead, he grabbed the frayed old map of the park he gotten from somewhere. He took it out and carefully unfolded it, peering at the park's odd layout. Although it abutted the coastline, it didn't make the best use of the property: it was instead roughly circular in design, and divided into six more or less equal sections, five along the perimeter, and the great Ferris wheel smack in the middle like the hub on a wheel. Sam chuckled, remembering suckering Dean into riding one of those things when he'd been a teenager. It was probably a cruel trick, knowing his brother's terror of heights, but nothing that Dean wouldn't have played on Sam.
He smiled ruefully at the memory, and noticed that, oddly enough, the section of the park containing the Ferris wheel was not circular, but rather five-sided, roughly the shape of a pentagram. Well, it just went to prove, clown were fucking evil.
Sam frowned. He rummaged in the glove compartment again and grabbed a pencil. He traced some lines onto the park map. That's why it looked so familiar. The park had been laid out like a giant devil's trap.
But why would...?
And then it all came together.
Sam was out of the car, running hard.
“Dean! Cas!”
Dean was hanging by a thread.
The trouble was, there were no threads.
He had managed to knock Bigfoot off of Cas by being a complete idiot and jumping into the sewer pit along with them, but then the monster had regained its senses and hurled him down in the direction of the cliff. He was within a couple feet of the edge now, pushing against the steady current of the oozing sludge.
“Cas!” he screamed.
There was nothing to hang on to, and the bottom was literally as slick as shit, and it kept sloping more and more downwards the closer you got to the edge, and Dean was fucking close to the edge right now. He scrambled for a handhold, and only slipped further down.
“CAS!”
Cas, who had now roused, was trying to use the wooden stake Dean had dropped, but it was about as effective as a toothpick on a grizzly bear. And this thing was three times bigger and about twelve times angrier than any grizzly bear. Bigfoot swung a paw, missing Cas, but shattering the stake.
Dean felt a foot slip over the edge. “Cas. Hurry!”
Bigfoot lunged to take a large bite out of Cas. By some uncanny stroke of luck, Cas managed to lodge a piece the broken stick into the thing's open mouth, sticking its jaws open. It flailed, frustrated. Cas turned and waded through the sludge to grab Dean's wrist, but then there was the problem that neither of them having anything to hold on to.
Dean heard a snap. Bigfoot had managed to shatter the stick. It squinted, one-eyed and furious at Dean and Cas, and began to slip and stide towards them.
“We're gonna die, right?” Dean asked Cas, who was currently the only thing keeping him from sliding off the cliff.
“That seems likely.”
The huge creature approached, roared, raised a paw....
And then froze.
"Exorcziamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica...”
“Sammy!” shouted Dean.
Bigfoot, looming over them, threw his head back and began to belch out a foul, sulfur-smelling black smoke. After what seemed an eternity, the smoke spun in a spiral, and then dissipated.
As for Bigfoot, he goggled, blinked, and then leaned entirely too far, toppling off the edge. As Dean sqeezed his eyes shut in terror, there was a moment of silence, followed by a giant splash in the water below.
Cas meanwhile had somehow found his footing, and now grasped Dean under the armpits, pulling him clear of the edge.
“What the hell, Sammy,” said Dean.
“I'm not useless!” Sam announced.
Dean looked at Cas. They were both completely coated in the toxic sludge. “No, you're not useless,” he told his brother.
Sam stared down at them. “Phew. You guys smell foul!”
Cas looked like a drowned kitten. He blinked up through dripping bangs, arms clamped over his pale chest.
Sam had found a hose and, miraculously, the park hadn't had its water turned off after all these years. He'd gotten Dean and Cas to strip down to their skivvies, and the had applied some water pressure to the mess, standing well upwind of them.
Dean had toughed out the cold water, but Cas cowered, shivering under the onslaught.
“Tetanus shots. Gamma globulin. Maybe Hep A shots. Cas, you know if your vessel has been vaccinated?”
“I don't know, Sam,” Cas whispered.
“So the park is basically a giant devil's trap?” asked Dean.
“Yeah,” said Sam. “I think the original owner may have planned it for a specific demon. That's why he abandoned it.”
“And then when Bigfoot comes wandering by....”
“The demon switched meatsuits. But he was still unable to leave.”
“Poor beast,” shivered Cas.
Dean slapped him on the back in an encouraging manner. “Hey, dude, don't be so down, you bagged Bigfoot!”
“I can't help but feel he was an innocent party. And now he's dead.”
“We don't know he's dead.”
“Dean,” laughed Sam. “He fell off a cliff.”
“Ah, but you can never be sure, you know. He's like Godzilla!”
“Bigfoot is like Godzilla?”
“I think that's good enough for now,” Dean announced, pointing a drippy hand at the hose.
Sam cranked off the faucet and picked up the ragged towels he'd scavenged from the back of the car. He tossed them over to Dean and Cas, being careful to keep his distance. “You can't keep treating us like we're toxic waste,” Dean protested.
“Sure I can,” said Sam.
“Hey. You notice something, Cas?”
Cas dabbed himself with a towel. “Sam isn't sneezing, Dean.”
“Yeah. What's the deal?”
Sam paused. He tried a cough, but it wasn't very convincing. “I dunno. The adrenaline, maybe?”
“He confronted his fear,” said Cas, brushing water out of his eyes. “Perhaps that is a contributing factor.” Dean laughed and applied his own towel to Cas’s hair. He still had a few kinks with the whole human showering thing.
Sam handed over sets of spare clothing, still standing well back of his toxic buddies. “You think that’s what it is? That’s funny, because Dean had to confront one of his phobias too.”
“What would that be? And, why do these pants say ‘juicy’ on the butt?” asked Dean, regarding the ragged sweat pants Sam had given him.
“I dunno. They were in the trunk. You keep some weird shit in that trunk, you know.”
“You confronted your fear of heights, Dean,” Cas informed him. He looked dubiously at his board shorts Sam had supplied before pulling them on.
“Well, I guess so. Not that I’m getting on a fucking Ferris wheel again any time this century.”
“So what did you confront, Cas?” asked Sam.
“I’m sorry?” And there was the canted head again.
“Hey, yeah, we need some narrative symmetry here,” said Dean.
Sam gawped at Dean. “What?”
“I read!” Dean told him. He turned back to Cas. “What are you afraid of, Cas?”
“Me, most probably,” came a very familiar voice.
Dean felt a chill slide down his spine. “Death,” he said to the newcomer. “This is … unexpected?”
“Or perhaps he fears a wardrobe malfunction,” quipped Death, tilting up his sunglasses to rest on the top of his head and reaching over to finger the hem of Cas's UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs T shirt. Cas went even more pale than usual.
“So, to what do we owe the pleasure?” asked Sam.
“Yeah, I sort of thought you were done with us, uh, so to speak,” said Dean.
“Due to current circumstances, we have come to possess certain interests in common. I rather think an alliance of sorts might prove to be mutually beneficial.”
“Circumstances?” said Dean.
“And what kind of alliance?” asked Sam.
Cas said nothing at all.
Death's featured settled into a moue. “I find I'm a bit peckish. Would you mind terribly moving this discussion to a venue where food might be available?”
Sam and Dean exchanged a look. “Uh. Sure,” said Dean.
And then the four were there no more.
NEXT