It isn't a nice house. There hasn't been a car in the garage in two decades; they can tell by the grass grown up in the gravel, foundation all sunk into the hillock like a rotten molar. Some waitress in a ugly-tight mint green uniform flipped out her order pad this morning over their coffees, snapped her gum, and (with a few hey darlin' s and a couple just passing through's) explained to them this old man who lived and limped with a walker in the house's tactile darkness.
Old man's batshit, apparently.
Old man's a tulpa, evidently.
Sam's doing the basement check with a flashlight and a sense of creeping apprehension that makes all the hair on his arms stand up, each corner swung round with a gun in his hand. Each heart-in-mouth turn is fruitless.
Then the shot rings out through the house, always, forever, the throb lining up just right with his heartbeat and now the thrrummmthruuummmthruumm might only be in Sam's nervous system but that's irrelevant.
The wife. Defined by the cutout of her short body and prudent bust in the just-so light of rising morning. Arms still up, grasping the skinny old luger pistol with both hands for dear life, that sewn up arrangement of her features Sam can almost replicate, seen it that many times, that last veil of control stretched tight over the animal.
Dean isn't pretty. Pants piss dark, body all limp and wrungout and old.
Her shot was excellent. Sam hoists his brother over his shoulder (something about mothers being able to lift cars off of their trapped children), and the old woman's aim was so good that he thinks of Stetsons, of lazy eyes, red-clay-dust and rogues. The warm body hanging limply down his back has a wound, surprisingly, astoundingly, right in the soft-pale spot behind the left ear.
There are two half-hearts alive in the drawing room, with nothing they could say to one another at all.