N.B.: I just wanted to write an Eileen story. She's neat. So here it is.

1 - Die Down Here

Eileen wondered if demons being total dicks was part of their general evil, or simply a personality defect of most of them. She hadn't hunted down enough to really know.

What was a good demon sample size? Thirty five? Fifty? One hundred? She knew she was trying to distract herself from the job at hand, but it wasn't working. Of course the demon she had hunted down would disappear into the one place she didn't want to go: a strip club. She also didn't understand why Portland had so many strip clubs and fancy doughnut/cupcake shops, but that seemed like a question for another time.

The demon she was trailing - did he know? She didn't think so, but you could never be a hundred percent with some demons - had ducked into a club named Pattycakes, which seemed sexist and infantalizing, and just gross as hell. Eileen had to suck it up and follow, but she was glad she had pulled up her hair inside a baseball cap, and was wearing baggy clothes. If no one looked too hard, she might pass as male. Or male-ish. She found male drag often helped you disappear into a crowd more, because being a woman, no matter where you were, always got you a certain amount of unwanted attention.

The first thing that hit her inside the place was the smell, which was flop sweat, desperation and cheap beer, with an underlying scent she could only really think of as ass. It was dark, but the stages and gyrating, half-naked women were extremely well lit. She could feel the music, which had the regular bass pulse thumping of a contemporary hit of one sort or another. Eileen had no musical preference, but she did kind of like the erratic, jackhammer thumping of some dance music, because the beat was simply insane. What must that sound like? She honestly couldn't imagine it was anything pleasant.

Her quarry, a very average looking white man with a regulation Portland beard, cut through to the back. She was afraid he was heading to a private booth, but it looked like he was headed to the men's room.

Oh god. A men's room in a strip club. There was another layer of gross here. Goddamn it.

After taking a moment to gather her wits and steel herself for the cavalcade of horrors to come, and to give her quarry some space, she followed him back there.

It was cleaner than she was expecting, which was something of a nice surprise. Really, it looked like any men's bathroom anywhere, with tiled walls and plastic mirrors, urinals and stalls. Less graffiti than she expected. Since she didn't see him, she knew he was in a stall.

Eileen had a special mix of holy water and salt she carried with her on demon hunts. It hit them like acid, and usually made them smoke out instantly. It was better than try to trap or exorcise them. Let them get burned, and they flew. Which kicked the can down the road, sure, but it was a quick solution to a problem that could get messier by the second. Demon possession, especially in this day and age, could be a tricky thing to manage. A quick glance told her there were only two people in the bathroom right now: her and her quarry. She couldn't have asked for better.

Hoping he really wasn't using the toilet, she kicked open the stall door, holy salt water in a flask in her hand, ready to fly -

- and what she saw stunned her to stillness. It actually took her a moment to comprehend what she was looking at, and then accept it as reality. From the shins down, he was human. From everything else up, he was ... what the fuck was he? He was a pile of roughly human sized bubbling black sludge, that smelled like rotted flesh and shit, and was collapsing and puddling on the floor around the toilet in a display as gross as it was improbable.

What the motherfucking fuck was going on?

Sam wondered how long he was going to let this go.

He knew Dean was in his room, brooding, drinking, listening to music, because they were fresh out of ideas about how to handle the Darkness - for now - and Cas hadn't gotten back to him, and Dean was just doing the Dean thing, which meant swallowing all the pain, and trying to drink enough to keep it all down.

Sam wished he could do that. He wished because last night, when he tried to get some sleep, he had a nightmare about being back in the cage with Lucifer again. Now he was up, and he'd be fucked if he was ever sleeping again without being medicated. What awesome shape they were in. They were both traumatized and reeling and feeling especially hopeless. Not new for them, really, but usually he and Dean gotten bitten by the despair bug at different times. Not the same time. Which was unfortunate.

Dean knew where to get stimulants, didn't he? He remembered the mystery pills he'd sometimes find in Dean's coat pockets, or hidden inside his pillowcase when they were teenagers. No matter what town they'd just moved into, give Dean ten hours, and he'd know where the hot make out spot was, and who had the hook up. It was like his superpower was finding trouble. He was a human divining rod for vices.

Sam wondered if Dad ever knew. He didn't seem to. He didn't like Dean getting wasted, told him drugs would not be tolerated, all that. It was Dean's secret rebellion that he had pain pills or uppers, or hung out with the stoners after school and took a few hits. Bobby knew ... didn't he? He didn't like Dean stealing beers when he was too young to drink, but he still let him do it from time to time. He also advised Dean to give drugs a pass, but he had to have known. Bobby liked to classify himself as an "old drunk", but he used that as his shield more than anything. He saw more than he usually let on, and his constant cold war with their Dad was proof of that if nothing else. But Bobby let Dean have it, as long as he didn't obviously bring it home, or get too fucked up to function. Bobby seemed to understand that in a hunter's life, sometimes you needed chemicals to get through the day. Year. Decade if you're lucky and were still relatively sane.

He shouldn't have thought of this. Now he was even sadder than before, thinking about Bobby. Sam was about a minute from barging down the hall to Dean's room to ask if he had any trucker speed that would keep him awake for the next twenty hours when he got an alert on his laptop.

He clicked the window, and was pleasantly surprised to see Eileen's face. "Hey Eileen," he said, signing a hello. It lifted his spirits a little just to see her. She looked pale, and the lighting where she was was stark. It also looked like there was a mirror behind her. Was she in a bathroom?

"Hi Sam. Okay, have you ever heard of a demon who decays his vessel?"

Sam wasn't sure he heard her correctly, but he must have. He wasn't that tired yet. "What do you mean decays his vessel?"

"I've been hunting this demon in Portland, and I just followed him into a bathroom. And I found him like this." She turned her phone around, and Sam wasn't sure what he was looking at at first, and then when he was sure, he couldn't believe it. Was it the lighting again? Because it looked for all the world like a body had decayed to putrescence sitting on a toilet. It was a big mound of black pudding, oozing onto the floor. It looked like its feet and calves were still intact, but those were slowly being consumed by the black ooze ... or joining it. It was hard to say. It was extremely gross, whatever it was.

Eileen swung the camera on the phone back to her. "Two minutes ago, tops, he walked in here, a normal human."

"How?" Sam exclaimed. That wasn't possible. "Was he hit with a biological weapon or something? A spell?" He almost added alien, because wasn't that a thing in one of those junky horror movies Dean watched? An oozing thing that came to Earth and turned people into gooey globs of things? Or maybe he was confusing a couple different movies. He'd have to ask Dean. Or not. Honestly, seeing them once had been bad enough.

She gave an exaggerated shrug. "I've been tailing him for the last half hour. I saw nothing suspicious. I was hoping you could tell me you've encountered this before."

"Not at all." In fact, if he ever had, he might have tried to bleach it out of his brain. Did it smell as bad as it looked? To be honest, Sam didn't want to know. His imagination was making it bad enough. "Which Portland are you in? Oregon, Maine ..?"

She grimaced. "Would telling you I'm in a strip club help?"

He nodded. That would explain the music he thought he could hear faintly in the background. "Oregon." Why were there so many strip clubs?

"Yep."

"Mind if we swing by?"

She shrugged. "As long as you don't cramp my style." She smiled, and it made Sam smile.

"We'll do our best not to. See you soon."

On the one hand, Sam very much did not want to encounter a demon that turned people into pools of black pudding. What the fuck was that about, and also, why? He'd heard of burning out vessels before, but that wasn't burning; that was melting. Again, spell jumped to mind, but that would be a hell of a spell, and any witch that could throw that needed to be taken off the market immediately.

Sam told himself it was a case that needed solving, and not simply an excuse to see Eileen again. Although it was that too. Besides, it would probably take their minds off despair if they were doing something, and a job this instantly perplexing and freaky was a rare thing.

Another thing? After seeing that melted pile of person, he didn't need uppers to keep him awake. Sam wasn't sure he'd ever sleep again.