Author's Note: This story contains the character that I created in 'Welcome to the Club' – Kole. In that story, the events were supposed to take place directly following Asylum, however, I started this story after more of the episodes were aired and I couldn't ignore them. There are a couple of places that allude to events in certain episodes (Spoiler warnings are in place) and I apologize if it is confusing, but I guess I am asking you to suspend your disbelief and just go with it. Thanks!

Melanic Manor

- Prologue -

oo0oo

Legend: There is a haunted house somewhere in the United States that is so scary that no guest has ever finished a full tour.

oo0oo

They were somewhere in New England, but whether they were still in Maine or had reached New Hampshire, they weren't sure. All they knew was that it was getting dark and cold. Winter may have passed, but the snow had only just melted and the wind was still quite chilly. They had been traveling non-stop since lunch and Dean knew that they all needed to eat, stretch, and take a bathroom break.

He pulled the Impala from the dark state route and onto an even darker rural road. The town, if you could even call it that, was obviously not a big tourist attraction. There were few street lamps, fewer stop lights, and no 'golden arches' in sight.

"How about there?" Sam said, pointing up the street and to the left. Had it not been for the single neon beer sign in the front window, he would have thought the place was just another abandoned building. Dean pulled into the parking lot and was surprised to see a dozen cars in the back already.

The interior was a far cry from the exterior. The place was actually nicer than a lot of the bars Dean had frequented. It was clean and only faintly smelled of smoke. There was a good selection of alcohol behind the bar and spotless menus on the tables.

They took a seat at a corner booth. Across the aisle, tables had been pulled together to make enough room for a dozen people, but there were only three girls huddled at one end facing the door. They were whispering and giggling and making no attempt to hide the fact that they had been checking out both Dean and Sam since they walked in. Apparently, they were not too worried that Kole, who had walked in with the boys, might be dating one of the Winchesters.

"Can I get you guys anything to eat?" a 30-something waitress asked with a pleasant smile.

"Yeah," Dean told her with a grin of his own, "I'll have a cheese burger with everything, fries, and whatever you have on tap that isn't light." The waitress nodded and then looked at Sam.

"Hamburger, plain; fries; and whatever you have on tap that is light." The waitress chuckled a little as she wrote down the order.

"I'll have a bowl of clam chowder and a… not-light beer," Kole told her, then the waitress walked away.

"Clam chowder?" Dean asked.

"Well, when in New England…" Kole began, but the rest was cut off by hoots and hollers from the three girls as another girl and two boys walked in the door and sat down. The group began laughing and talking loudly, but the only thing intelligible to anyone not sitting at the table was that they were ordering another pitcher of beer and that the three newcomers had made it to the 'third floor'.

It was just over a half an hour later when two more guys walked in to cheers from the same table. Again, they sat, talked, laughed, and ordered a pitcher of beer. The two new guys told stories of doctors and dentists and the 'fourth floor'.

As Dean finished the last bite of his burger and polished off his beer, he noticed that the fourth floor guys were beginning to taunt the third floor guys. He saw that the latter two were eying the pool tables at the back of the bar while moodily trying to ignore their friends. Dean ordered another beer and headed back to a table in the hopes of sparking up a game and making some money. He didn't have to wait long.

When Sam finished eating, he took out the newspaper that he had bought during their lunch break and began scanning it once again to try and find anything out of the ordinary. Nothing looked promising. In frustration, he crumbled the paper into a ball and went to throw it away.

On the way back to the table, he noticed that the party of eight (including the two guys that were still playing pool with Dean) were no longer laughing, but nervously looking at the door of the bar. They weren't talking loudly; rather, an uneasy hush seemed to have fallen over them. The two fourth floor guys got up from the table and left, but returned about twenty minutes later. The group huddled together and began whispering.

When the waitress brought Sam and Kole each another beer, she stopped at the large table to ask if they wanted anything else. Sam saw that one of the girls jumped a little and another shook her head quickly, each immediately turning back to watch the door.

"So," Dean said as he sat back down at the table, "should we just stay here tonight?"

"Yeah, I guess," Sam told him. "We don't have any set destination – I haven't found us another job."

"Excuse me," one of the girls from the large table said timidly. "Do any of you have the time?" Then, seeing that both Kole and Dean turned to the clock on the wall behind the bar, she added, "I mean, I just wanted to see if that one was right."

"Yeah," Sam said with a quick glance at both the clock and his watch, "it's right."

"Oh," she said quietly and with a hint of disappointment. "Thanks." She began to walk back to her table.

"Is something wrong?" Dean asked. The girl turned back towards their table and looked at them with an anxious expression. He noticed that the rest of her group was now looking at them, all with the same worried faces. "Are you guys waiting for someone?"

"Well, it's like this…" one of the guys started as Dean, Sam, and Kole joined the larger group at their table. "Have you guys ever heard of the haunted house that is supposed to be so scary that no one has ever gone all the way through?"

"The urban legend, you mean," Kole said more than asked.

"Yeah," one of the girls said, "we thought it was a legend, too. But, we found it. It's here in our town."

"Found it?" Sam asked, skeptical. "If the infamous too-scary haunted house is your town, why would you have to 'find' it? And how come no one else can ever pinpoint its location?"

"Well, it hasn't always been here," she tried to explain. "I mean, the building has, but it's been abandoned for years. The haunted house part, though… that's new…"

"And we had to check it out," the first guy took up the story again. "There were ten of us at the start. We stayed together at the beginning but once some people got too scared," he looked over at Dean's pool buddies, "we came here."

"That was the plan anyway," the girl took over again. "We knew that we weren't all brave enough to go through the whole thing, so we decided that we would meet back here when each of us left the house." She looked at the door again.

"Ten of you," Dean said. "So, you're still waiting for two of your friends?"

"Yeah," the first guy said, "but it's after 8:00 now. We started at 5:00…"

"And," one of the other girls said, "they told us that each of the floors shouldn't take more than a half an hour to get through."

"They?" Sam asked.

"Yeah, there were three guys there. Brothers, I think. They said they were the ones who were in charge of the house. They took the money and explained the rules to us."

"Let me guess," Dean said, "if you make it the whole way through, you get your money back."

"Actually," the first girl said, "you pay $50 to get in and get $5 back for each floor you complete. But, if you make it through all five floors, you get $100."

"And you don't think that your friends are just trying to finish the last floor?" Sam asked.

"Or, they've finished and just decided to call it a night?" Kole added.

"No," the first guy said. "Scott and I went back to check."

"Yeah," said the guy next to him – apparently Scott. "But the dudes that were working at the place were… weird. One told us that Jay and Mike were still in there, another said that they left, and… and the third one said that there were only eight of us to start with."

Melanic - very black