The Thing That Should Not Be

1 – Space Remains

A heavy thud brought Dean back to full consciousness, and before he even focused his eyes, he was sitting up, gun extracted from beneath his pillow and aimed out at the room.

When his eyes finally focused, he was staring down the barrel at Sam, who was crouched on the floor, frozen in the process of picking up his laptop bag. "Jumpy much?" he wondered.

Dean let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, and put his gun on the nightstand. "Kinda hard not to be, isn't it? There's only an apocalypse pending."

Sam shrugged, straightening up with his laptop. "Then maybe you'd be up to this. I think we have a case."

"Oh yeah?" He dry washed his face before stumbling to the bathroom, trying to pretend that his four hours of sleep had been restful. Usually he didn't have a lot of nightmares, but last night he did. He couldn't remember most of them, just the general feeling of upset that left his stomach tied up in knots. It felt like he'd swallowed a mouth full of cement.

Sam spoke up, so Dean could hear him over the water running in the sink. "Up the coast, a couple of hours from here, the city of Port Windsor, Oregon had the body of a fisherman wash up completely divested of all organs. This coincides with the return of sightings of the local legend sea monster known as Winnie."

Dean spit out a mouthful of toothpaste. For some reason, even the toothpaste tasted sour this morning. "A sea monster? Really?"

"As I said, it's just a local legend. But it hasn't been sighted in ages. And that hollow fisherman is undoubtedly strange."

He had to give him that. Also, it would be nice to deal with something non-apocalypse related. Dean knew he was tired of all this angels and demons, Lucifer and Michael shit. Sam probably was too. "Okay. Point Windsor it is."

It was good to have a plan. Dean hadn't realized how much he missed that until now.

The drive to Port Windsor was uneventful, and both Dean and Sam were happy to let the radio fill in the silence. What was there to say? They were supposedly fated to act as meat suits for Lucifer and Michael, and bring on the apocalypse by killing each other, or at least one of them. Fate could go suck a bag of dicks as far as Dean was concerned, but hey, no one had asked him.

But they'd just passed the official "Welcome to Port Windsor" sign, with a lighthouse and a leaping cartoon fish on it, all big eyes and smiles, when the radio fuzzed out. The sky, which had been clear, suddenly darkened with gray clouds. Sam glanced out the passenger window. "Is this weird?" Dean wondered.

Sam shrugged. "It's Oregon. This close to the coast, the weather can be pretty mercurial."

"You say that like I know what it means."

The radio fuzzed back to life, but Murder City Devils had been replaced by what sounded like hardcore dance music, a lot of thumping, repetitive bass. Dean couldn't snap the radio off fast enough. "So, big raver community up here?"

"If you don't like fishing, there might not be a lot else to do," Sam replied. At least he was in a good mood.

Also, Sam probably had a minor point. Driving in, the town looked picture postcard quaint, with lots of rustic clapboard, and no building looking like it was particularly recent, at least not this close to the water. It looked as sleepy and boring as all hell. There was a lighthouse, a black striped white tower that rose on a narrow spit of land that reached about twenty feet into the main harbor. Dean couldn't guess how tall it was from here, or if it even worked anymore. Maybe because it was technically daytime, no matter how overcast it was, the light wasn't currently on.

They found a motel called Shoreline, which was a bit of false advertising, as it was a few blocks from anything resembling a shore. But it was so quiet, Dean guessed this was not tourist high season. In fact, the Impala was only the third car in the parking lot, and he wondered if they were the only guests here.

They changed into their fed suits, picked out suitable IDs, and headed for the local cop shop, which, due to the size of the town, also had the coroner's/M.E.'s office right next door. It was a one stop shop for official murder and mayhem. Made their jobs easier.

The town Sherriff was one Martin Appleby, a guy who could have been a stunt double for Sam Elliott if he ever came down with malaria. He was nearly as tall as Sam, but he weighed maybe forty pounds less, making him look gaunt and positively skeletal, his tobacco yellowed skin pulled taut over his bony frame. He was rocking an impressive gray walrus 'stache and matching sideburns, as well as long, wavy silver hair he wore back in a ponytail. Dean thought he might have been the first hippie Sherriff he'd ever met.

He had a brisk, strong handshake, and even though he wondered why Fish and Wildlife would concern themselves with a dead fisherman, he seemed eager to have anyone else take this weirdo case off his hands.

Appleby led them over to the coroner's office, after admitting that their M.E. was also the local doc, Doctor Olivia O'Brien, who was currently working at her clinic. He gave them directions to her place, and then left them alone.

"Pretty laid back in these parts," Dean noted, opening a refrigerated corpse drawer.

Sam put on a pair of latex gloves, and shrugged. "Small town."

Still, didn't it seem way too easy? Or was this just more of his own paranoia? He wasn't honestly sure, and wasn't up to asking Sam for his opinion yet.

The fisherman in the drawer had been named Paul Graham, and had been a lifelong resident of Port Windsor. He was divorced with no kids, and had had a very average life, at least as far as Sam could dig up. He was forty five, thirty pounds overweight, and looked so pale he was almost translucent. Except he looked strangely flat, at least from the neck down. "How long was he in the water?" Dean asked, as he put on latex gloves of his own. Sam was the expert at looking into corpses, but he knew he had to be ready to assist.

"Not long. Maybe a couple of hours at most." Sam did the slightest double take looking at Graham's collapsed chest. "That's weird."

It quickly got weirder. Sam used a scalpel to open Graham up again, retracing the Y incision of Doctor O'Brien, and he open the flaps of skin to reveal … Nothing. Absolutely nothing. "Wow," Dean remarked. "You know, when you said he was hollowed out, I didn't quite believe you."

Sam's brow furrowed in consternation, as he opened up Graham all the way to his pelvis. He didn't even have intestines. "What the hell..? Even his ribcage is missing."

Dean had somehow overlooked that, but yes, it was. Graham was essentially a skin suit with a spine and a head. Not a lot of blood either. Dean wondered if his junk was intact beneath the sheet, but he really didn't want to know. "What would do this?"

"Damned if I know," Sam admitted. "I've never seen anything like this before." Sam put the scalpel down, and picked up a clipboard that was sitting on a nearby shelf. "O'Brien left her findings out."

"We should have read those first."

"Legs and head intact, torso completely empty. No bites or cuts visible; method of internal organ extraction unknown. Cause of death unknown." Sam put the clipboard down, and frowned down at flattened Graham.

"I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say being gutted like a fish was what killed him."

"Help me turn him over."

Dean raised his eyebrows. "Why? Should I go get a spatula?"

"There has to be some kind of mark. Organs and intestines and a ribcage don't just disappear. There has to be some sign of what occurred."

Even though he was super light, Graham was also kind of squishy, which made hefting him up gross. It didn't help that his legs were now the heaviest part of his body, and it felt like his upper half just wanted to tear off, like a paper doll attached to concrete. There were no marks on his back, besides what looked like a mole that could have been melanoma, and none on his legs either. Sadly, Dean discovered his junk had indeed gone missing (now there was a visual he'd need to drink away), but as Sam disgustingly reported, it didn't look torn or cut off; it was just gone.

Having exhausted possibilities in the lower half of the body, Sam retrieved a bone saw from O'Brien's equipment cupboard, and sawed off the top of Graham's skull. Dean was only mildly surprised to find his skull was as hollow as the torso. "What the fuck?" Sam exclaimed, shining his penlight into the empty space where the man's brain used to be.

"Is there any chance O'Brien removed it?" Dean asked, taking a shot in the dark.

Sam shook his head. "I don't see why. You'd think she'd have made a note of it." He checked the clipboard again, in case he missed something. Since he put it back down without comment, Dean assumed there was no 'P.S.: Took out brain with an ice cream scoop' in the notes."How could something remove all of a man's organs – and ribcage – and not leave a single mark?"

Dean scratched his head. "Could something have liquefied his organs?"

"What?"

"Damned if I know. I'm just thinking out loud."

Sam looked in the hollow cavity of his skull again. "There had to be an opening of some sort, assuming there was no liquefaction."

Dean almost felt gross suggesting this, but someone had to say it. "What if they used his, um, available holes?"

Sam gave him a horrified glance. "What, you think they yanked his ribcage through his mouth?"

"Or … someplace else."

Sam shuddered. "Ugh. You'd think there'd be tearing or something … hey, wait a sec. You got a light on you?"

Dean pulled out his flashlight and trained it where Sam had his light, on the opposite side of the interior of Graham's skull, close to the right ear. It was kind of hard to see, because there was a very light film of blood in the interior, but with so much light, Dean saw what Sam had noticed. It was an impression of a tiny circle, no bigger than a nickel. "What the hell is that?"

"I don't know," Sam admitted. He pulled out his phone, and took a picture of the mark. "I can send it to Bobby, see if he has any ideas."

Outside, Dean heard a distant rumble of thunder. Boy, the weather turned ugly fast around here. They put Graham back they way they found him, more or less, and covered the mess with the sheet before sliding the drawer shut. Sam peeled off his gloves, and wrote a note on the clipboard. Presumably he was alerting O'Brien to the missing brain.

Dean threw his own gloves in the garbage, and with Sam busy elsewhere, he allowed himself a moment to shudder. Goddamn, that was gross. He'd seen a lot of gross things in his life, but that was definitely up there.

The lights flickered as thunder rolled in, louder now, almost directly overhead. Sam checked his phone, and asked, "You getting any reception?"

Dean checked. He had no bars at all. "Nope." It was that second the power died, leaving them in a darkened morgue.

Sam heaved a sigh. "This figures somehow, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, our luck's been fantastic lately." At least it wasn't a long trip to the door. But when Dean pushed it open, the wind slammed it against the wall, and the rain blew into his face almost sideways. It wasn't so much a downpour as it was a monsoon. "Son of a bitch," Dean spluttered, holding his arm up in a futile gesture to protect him from some of this storm.

"Goddamn it," Sam said. He then nudged Dean's arm, and asked, "What's that?"

It took Dean a moment to blink enough rain from his eyes to see what Sam was referring to. The wind and rain had already turned the parking lot into a shimmering pond, but there was an awful lot of shimmering considering the low light.

And a flash of lightning revealed all. It wasn't just rain pelting down from the sky. It was tiny silver fish, no bigger than a pinky, and black see through tadpoles, along with tiny frogs, who hopped away, as dazed and confused as the humans watching them fall from the clouds.

"This is an omen, right?" Dean asked. "Have we walked into something here?"

"I dunno," Sam said, but he sounded unsure of his own denial.

Considering how fantastic their luck had been, Dean was sure it was sign of something big and ugly. Goddamn it, even cases had to be needlessly complicated nowadays.