Title: The Cabin in the Woods
Author: MegTDJ
Category: Case fic, hurt/comfort
Rating: T
Pairing: None
Characters: Sam, Dean, Ruby, OCs
Spoilers: Up to 4x16, On the Head of a Pin.
Length: 15,000+ words
Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural. I'm doing this for fun, not profit. The only thing I own is the story itself, so please don't archive this fic without my permission.
Summary: Sam and Dean are on the case when residents of a small town begin displaying symptoms of what seems to be ghost sickness. But is it really ghost sickness, or is something more sinister at work? And how far will they go to stop it?
Author's notes: It's very important to keep in mind that this fic is set between the events of After School Special (4x13) and Sex & Violence (4x14), but mentions events we find out about in On the Head of a Pin (4x16). I tried to stay within the bounds of canon as much as I could.
I wrote this for Moonshayde's birthday, since she wanted some crazy Dean and to-the-rescue Sam, and her wish is [sometimes] my command. She tells me she enjoyed it, so it has earned the stamp of approval, and now it's time to share it!
I hope anyone who reads it enjoys. Just remember, I'm not an expert at any of the subjects I've written about in here, and my spelling is Canadian and therefore correct. Please don't nitpick. Thank you. :P
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Chapter 1
"Another high school?" Dean scowled at the article Sam had brought up on the laptop screen. "What is it with you and school lately?"
Sam rolled his eyes and turned the laptop back around to face him. "It's not just the school, Dean," he said. "That's just where the latest outbreak was centralized. Get this - police and paramedics were only able to enter the building after filling the place with tear gas, and fifteen children were hospitalized with symptoms described as 'red welts on the skin, visual and auditory hallucinations, debilitating anxiety, and in extreme cases, convulsions.' That makes twenty-three cases throughout the town this week, and nobody can explain the disease's origin or how it's spreading."
"So you're thinking ghost sickness."
Sam shrugged and snapped the laptop shut. "Fits, doesn't it?"
Dean winced. "Yeah, but twice in six months? I thought it was supposed to be rare."
"Rare, yes, but it's not impossible. What's the harm in checking it out?"
"What's the harm in checking it out?" Dean repeated in disbelief. "Are you kidding me? You're not the one who almost died last time."
"Well..." Sam hesitated, tilting his head from side to side. "If it's any consolation, I doubt you can contract it twice."
Dean glared at him. "That might be comforting if anyone else had ever survived it in the first place," he grumbled.
"So, we'll be more careful this time, Dean. No autopsies, I promise."
Dean just kept right on glaring. He could have sworn Sam was trying not to laugh.
"Besides, we know how to cure it now," Sam said in all seriousness. "And do you really want all these people to suffer and die like that?"
Dean sighed and drummed his fingers on the table. Of course he didn't want them to suffer and die like that. He just didn't want to suffer and die like that either.
And he really didn't want to relive his hallucinations of Lilith or the memories of Hell that she had stirred up. Still, he was busting for a job, and this was all Sam had been able to find.
"Fine," he said. "We'll take it."
But that didn't mean he had to like it.
It only took them an hour to reach the town. Getting into the town was the biggest problem.
Dean stared at the roadblock in dismay. "Quarantine?" He really hated towns that only had one road in or out.
"If the town has been locked down like this, I doubt our Health Department guise is gonna fly," Sam said. He squinted to get a better look through the car window at the vehicles parked around the blockade. "They're probably already here."
"So, what do you think? FBI?"
Sam shook his head and pointed at a black van half hidden from view behind a police car. "They're here, too."
"Crap." Dean sighed. "What, then?"
Sam shrugged. "They're not blocking off the woods."
Dean wanted to protest, but he knew Sam was right. It would mean hiking uphill through a mile's worth of trees and God knew what else, carrying bags full of pretty much everything in the trunk just in case it was needed, but it would get them there. Providing they weren't caught in the meantime.
He pulled a U-turn and found a secluded spot down the road to park the car. Once he and Sam had packed as much into their bags as they could hold, they cut across the street and aimed for the tree line.
Dean grimaced when he got a good look at the dense foliage they had to wade through. Suddenly that one mile seemed so much longer.
"Heigh-ho, heigh-ho," he said. Off to work they went.
Or at least they tried. Dean could tell before they'd gone ten feet that not too many hikers ventured into these woods. Not only were they creepy as hell, they were also downright dangerous. He hoped they wouldn't end up needing a quick getaway - even without the closely-packed trees, all the roots and tangled brush under their feet would make running impossible.
He glared at his brother's back as Sam led the way. This was the last time in a long time that he'd let Sam pick their next case.
"Are we there yet?" he asked after they'd been wading through trees for at least ten minutes.
Sam turned around just long enough to shoot him a dark look. "Not even close."
Dean grumbled obscenities under his breath and yelped when a tree branch smacked him in the face. He glared at Sam's back twice as hard when he heard him chuckle. "Not funny, bitch."
"Then quit whining, jerk."
Dean dodged just in time to avoid the next branch Sam whipped back at him. He grunted angrily and shoved his way past him. "I'm taking point if you're gonna be a jackass about it."
"Be my guest."
Much to Dean's annoyance, Sam stayed too far behind him to fall for the branch-in-the-face trick himself, so aside from the crackle of twigs under their boots and the sound of their increasingly laboured breathing, the next few minutes passed in silence. It was just as well - what with the weight on his back, the rough terrain, and the ever-steepening slope, Dean had no breath left for talking. He barely had breath left for breathing.
Because of this, he thought for a moment that it was a mirage when he suddenly broke through the trees and found himself in a peaceful little clearing complete with a bubbling stream and a homey little cottage. He blinked in surprise and turned to see if Sam was seeing it, too.
From the slack-jawed look on Sam's face as he came up behind him, Dean was pretty sure he was.
"Huh," Sam said. "Wonder if anybody's home?"
"More importantly," Dean said as he staggered toward the cottage, "I wonder if they have pie. I'm starving."
He jerked to a stop when he felt a sharp whack to the back of his head.
"Ow!" he cried, spinning around to face Sam. "Dude! What the hell was that?"
Sam shrugged sheepishly. "Mosquito."
"Mos..." Dean rolled his eyes and cuffed Sam on the side of his head in retaliation. "I can kill 'em myself, you know."
"Geez, just trying to help."
Dean felt victorious when Sam rubbed the side of his head to alleviate the sting. Served him right. Why the guy was inflicting as much bodily harm today as possible he didn't know, but he planned on making him pay for it later. He just hoped nobody inside the cottage had witnessed their Laurel and Hardy act.
They appeared to be at the back of the house, so they traipsed around to the front, noting as they went that the place didn't seem to have many windows. There were none at all on the ground floor, at least on the sides of the house they could see. It made Dean suspicious. People with no windows had something to hide.
He patted Sam's arm as they reached the front porch, indicating with raised eyebrows that he wanted to tread carefully. Sam nodded, and they climbed the steps together.
There was a doorbell beside the door, so Dean pushed it. They waited for an answer, but thirty seconds passed with no movement from inside the house.
"Hello?" Dean called, pressing the doorbell again. "Anybody here?" He could hear the doorbell chime inside, and the place was tiny. There was no way they weren't being heard. Either nobody was home, or they were being ignored.
He exchanged a curious look with Sam, who shrugged his shoulders. Without a second thought, Dean lightly turned the doorknob, looking casually over his shoulder to make sure they weren't being watched.
The door swung open with no effort whatsoever. Practically a written invitation as far as Dean was concerned.
He poked his head around the doorframe. "Hello?"
Still no answer.
He was about to step inside when Sam grabbed his arm. Dean shot him an impatient look. "What?"
"What exactly are we doing here, Dean?" Sam asked in a whisper. "Shouldn't we keep heading into town?"
"What, we can't make a pit stop?"
"If someone was home, yeah. What are we gonna do, steal their food?"
Dean considered this for a moment, but he realized that saying yes would only prolong the argument. "Maybe nobody lives here at all," he said. "Might be a good place to squat while we're here."
Sam gave him a wry look. "You really think no one lives here?" he said, pointing to the floor just inside the door.
Dean looked down. A pair of men's sneakers were sitting neatly on a spotless doormat. "Oh."
"Let's just go, okay?" Sam pulled on his arm as he headed back down the steps.
Dean hesitated, trusting his gut instinct that something was off about this place. He yanked his arm out of Sam's grasp when he suddenly realized what it was. "Hey, come back up here," he said, pushing the door open further and getting as close to the threshold as he could without stepping across it. "Do you smell that?"
Sam came to stand beside him again and leaned over Dean's shoulder to sniff the air. "What is that?" he said. "Asafoetida?"
"Yeah."
They both dropped their bags and drew their guns simultaneously. They'd been around long enough to know what that smell meant - spell work, and not the harmless kind. In a town where people were contracting a mysterious illness from an unknown source, a house in the middle of the woods that smelled of major league Hoodoo was what Dean would consider a lead. Whoever lived here had officially forfeited their right to privacy.
Dean led the way inside with Sam following close behind, both careful not to make a sound. There was a staircase just inside the entryway leading up to the second floor. Dean motioned for Sam to take it while he moved further into the main room, toward what appeared to be the kitchen.
For a floor with no windows, it seemed otherwise pretty unremarkable. There was a ceiling light on in the main room, revealing a plump couch, two high-backed chairs, and a plain old coffee table. There were no ornaments or decorations aside from a cuckoo clock on the wall, which gave the room an unauthentic vibe but wasn't really cause for alarm.
The kitchen was no different - there was just enough light shining through the doorway for him to see that there were plates and cutlery in the sink and a frying pan on the stove, but that everything else was neatly in its place. Almost too neatly. He was starting to think they'd stumbled across the home of some OCD freak who had been chased out of town for being too damn tidy.
But then, there was that smell. He sniffed the air, trying to figure out where it was coming from. He opened a few cupboards and drawers to see if he could find any asafoetida kicking around, but he found nothing but boxes and cans of food and some cooking utensils.
What the hell?
He jumped when Sam suddenly appeared behind him.
"Anything?" Sam asked.
Dean shook his head. "You?"
"Nothing. Just a bedroom and a bathroom, both empty aside from the standard furniture. Not even any books or knick-knacks or anything."
"Yeah." Dean tapped his finger on the kitchen counter, looking thoughtfully around the room. "Notice what's missing here?"
"Aside from pretty much everything?"
Dean gave him an impatient look. "Where's the basement?" he said.
"No door?"
"Not that I've seen."
"Huh." Sam turned and started poking around the kitchen, tapping the walls with his knuckles and the floor with his foot, looking for a hidden door. Dean went back to the front room and did the same thing.
Two minutes later, they met up again in the kitchen doorway. They'd both come up empty.
"There's gotta be more to this place," Dean said with a sigh of frustration. "Maybe the door's outside."
They headed back to the front door, but Sam tapped Dean's arm before he had a chance to open it. "Hold up a sec," he said. "I want to try something."
He went over to the staircase and crouched down in front of it, poking at the floor around the bottom step.
"I already looked there, man," Dean said, going for the front door again. "No trapdoor, no nothing."
With that, Sam lifted the staircase.
Dean blinked in surprise at the sight of it rising above Sam's head and revealing a descending staircase underneath it. "How the hell did you know it did that?"
Sam grinned and shrugged. "Only place we hadn't looked."
Dean rolled his eyes and cautiously followed Sam down the stairs into the deep, dark basement. To his relief, the moveable staircase stayed firmly in place above their heads, laying his fears of decapitation to rest.
Until Sam reached the bottom step, and some kind of built-in mechanism began to lower it back into place. Dean ducked and hurried down the rest of the steps before he got smacked in the head yet again.
And then they were in darkness.
Dean fumbled for his flashlight, beating Sam to it by a fraction of a second. Once they regained their sight enough to look around, they both stood slack-jawed in amazement.
The symbols were the first thing that caught Dean's attention - they were all over the walls, written either in blood or in very convincing-looking red paint. Most appeared to be Hoodoo, but he recognized a few from other dark practices, and at least one devil's trap had been hastily scrawled onto the ceiling.
But they didn't hold his attention for long. Not when there were half a dozen tables full of science lab equipment set up all over the room, complete with steaming test tubes, bubbling beakers, and petri dishes full of pink slime.
His gaze was then attracted by the full set of bookshelves along one wall, which appeared to contain books on both science and the occult, judging from the pictures and symbols on the spines. There was so much to take in that his eyes kept darting back and forth between it all, not knowing what they should be staring at the most.
"Good God almighty," Dean muttered. "It's like The Craft meets The Nutty Professor in here."
"What the hell is this place?" Sam asked in amazement. "Think they're, what... mixing science with black magic?"
"Bound to happen sometime," Dean said, stepping closer to one of the tables to get a better look at the blue liquid in one of the beakers.
"Don't touch anything, Dean."
Dean spun around to glare at Sam. "You really think I want to?"
Sam shifted his weight nervously from one foot to the other and back again as he looked around. "Maybe we should get out of here," he said. "You know, until we get a better idea of what we're dealing with."
Dean hated to admit it, but he wholeheartedly agreed. He was definitely not comfortable being locked in this room much longer, especially with all the scents his mind was beginning to register from all the potions boiling around him. Whoever this dude... or chick... was, they were messing with some pretty serious crap. His senses were already starting to fog over, and this was not the kind of high he would enjoy.
"Any idea how we'll open the door, or... stairs again?" he asked as they hurried over to them.
Sam shrugged and placed his foot on the bottom step. Sure enough, the upstairs staircase rose above their heads.
They didn't waste a second in getting the hell out of there.