"The Hunting of Thin."
Mystic25
Summary: Something dark is stalking children; Sam and Dean investigate. T for language, violence and imagery.
Rating: T for what I just said.
A/N: This is my Halloween Fic. Dedicated to Soncricia whom I told about it first. Apologies for the lame summary.
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"Come little children, the times come to play,
Here in my garden of shadows."
~"Hocus Pocus"
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"Jessica!"
Thomas's voice echoed through the concrete drain pipe that had been transformed into a playground toy. He crawled through the narrow space, managing to scrape his knees even through his jeans. "Jessica! Wait!" The end of the tunnel seemed super far away, and he was already sorry that he left the smaller kiddie playground to try and follow his eight-year-old sister to the bigger one.
A circle of sunlight was just a few handful of reaches away and he crawled faster.
A dark shadow jumped down into the small bit of light and a wailing screech blasted at him.
Thomas screamed and fell backwards, scraping his hands and his knees again.
The figure started laughing, the darkness gave way to a pink tutu and fairy wings. "Scardy cat, scardy cat! You're so scared and pumpkin fat!"
"I wasn't scared!" Thomas insisted, reaching out his foot to kick his sister in the face with the heel of his red sneaker.
"Yeah you were baby!" His sister Jessica mocked him.
Thomas shoved past her and onto a crunching of bright orange leaves and into the crisp October evening air. The sun had started to set, turning the sky a fiery orange outlined with inky blue.
"It's not even Halloween!" Thomas yelled to his sister who was staring at him with arms crossed over her chest, smiling smugly in her princess fairy costume she had gotten last week at Target.
"I'm wearing this to the parade at school tomorrow," Jessica said it like Thomas was too young to understand such important things.
The playground was a place of swings and slides and cedar chips, ringed with wood and surrounded by woods that had yet to be developed by an overzealous population. Thick evergreen trees surrounded the playground and threw their long shadows over the orange leaves like fingers.
Thomas stared at the shadows by his feet like they were ghosts. "We better go home," He started to back away from the leaves. "It's almost dark-"
"What's your problem?" Jessica sounded too much like their older sister Meghan, who was 16 and rolled her eyes at everything, even when she gave their dog Brownie a bath. "You scared?"
"Mommy's going to be mad!" Thomas shouted back.
"Mommy's going to be mad!" Jessica singsonged. "Is the wittle baby scared?" She laughed mockingly.
There was a little path of concrete that ran out past the metal playground to the smaller plastic constructed playground meant for the younger kids. The concrete walkway continued around some benches sitting a few yards away beside a cluster of oak trees where moms and dads sat and watched their kids play. There was only one other kid on the playground beside them. A woman in a white dress called out the little girl's name, and she hopped off the still spinning merry go round and walked down to where her mom was waiting by the bench. The girl took her mom's hand, and both left together, their feet crunched through the leaves on the ground.
"I'm not scared!" Thomas yelled in retaliation to Jessica.
Jessica rolled her eyes at the annoyance of little brothers. She was still looking at the empty bench where the girl and the woman had just been because a squirrel was now darting along the back of the bench and she liked to watch squirrels play. It hopped along briskly, and her eyes followed the thing as it leapt to the ground and ran until it darted up the trunk of a nearby tree. She turned back around, and when she looked back, someone was there.
It was a man; he was standing in the shadows of the biggest of the oak trees a few yards away from the bench. He was almost hard to see because he was wearing a dark black suit and tie, and Jessica only saw him because his shirt was white and glowed like a lighting bug.
He was really tall and really skinny, and his neck looked as thin as a stick. He just stared straight ahead, watching them.
Jessica blinked, because she thought she was imagining it. Because it looked like the man had no face, no eyes, and no nothing. Just a blank oval on top of his body.
"Jessie, we got to go home!" Thomas started yanking at her fairy wings.
"Ow!" Jessica yelped. "Thomas let go!" She whipped around and snatched her brother's hand from her wings.
She looked backwards over her shoulder and righted her wings on her back; and when she turned around again, the man was gone, like a magic trick.
Thomas stared at the place where she was looking. "What are you looking at sissy?"
"I thought I saw a man," Jessica returned, checking that the laurel of flowers was still on top of her head. She really loved her costume. "And don't call me 'sissy' that's a baby thing to say!" Her skirt was made of pink sparkly tulle and glittered in the setting sun.
Her costume was the only one left at the store, and was ugly until her mom and sewn the tulle around it. She was going to win the costume contest for sure tomorrow. She spun around, letting the skirt flounce out, her ballerina slippers crunch, crunching on the leaves.
The world became a dizzyingly blur like how she saw things outside her car window when it was raining outside.
She stopped spinning when she spotted something black.
The man in the suit was now standing inside the playground circle, arms still down by his side. He was now standing right beside one of the streetlights that were turned on after it got too dark on the playground to see. The light stayed off now, even though the sun was almost down completely.
Jessica's eyes widened because she hadn't been imagining it-
The man had no face. Just a round oval head, he stood there like a thin wispy tree.
He was only a handful of steps away from them.
Thomas shrank back from the man, Jessica felt him grabbing a hold of her fairy wings, and this time she was too speechless to tell him to stop.
The streetlight suddenly popped on, then flickered back and forth like moths were flying inside it. Something long and snake like whipped out from behind the man's back, coming towards them.
Jessica screamed, high and piercing, she grabbed her little brother's wrist and dragged him with her over the cedar chips and down the sidewalk.
She didn't look back, just kept running, running, even when Thomas begged her to stop with heavy panting breaths.
She ran into something that grabbed her arm. She screamed louder.
"Jessie, what the hell?"
Meghan, her big sister stood there with her dyed multicolored hair, in a Fall Out Boy concert t-shirt and jeans, and no coat even though it was getting pretty cold outside.
"There's a man! He's going to eat us!" Thomas wailed, trying to jump on Meghan's back.
Meghan shrugged her little brother off of her. "Get off twerp!"
Their older sister raised her head up to the playground, which was empty, except for playground equipment and dry leaves. She looked at her younger siblings in accusation. "Very funny; Mom's been looking for you for like forever!" Meghan grabbed Jessica's arm in one hand and Thomas' in the other. "Come on, I'm already going to be late for the Halloween party because of you baby brats!"
Jessica felt herself being tugged harshly by Meghan. She turned around and saw only the empty playground, but there was a glint of a reflection in the metal slide, of something thin and black.
"Jessie, let's go!" Meghan yanked on her arm harder, dragging her towards home.
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Jessica pushed the food around on her plate, even though chicken nugget sandwiches were her favorite thing ever; and her mom had cut them up to look like little pumpkins for Halloween, which was in two days.
"Jessie, honey you've barely touched your food," her mom stared at her in concern over her own plate.
"I'm not hungry," Jessica returned, she glanced up at the mullioned windows of their dining room. There were no curtains on the windows so the inky blackness of the night shown into the house.
"But it's your favorite," Her mom argued. "Are you feeling okay honey?"
"She's said she saw a man on the playground," Meghan returned like she was blowing a raspberry. She stabbed a chicken nugget with her fork, but didn't eat it because last week she had decided she was a vegetarian.
"I didn't!" Jessica snapped at her older sister. "Thomas did!"
"What man?" Their mom asked.
"He was real!" Thomas insisted from his bright red booster seat beside Meghan. "He was a ghost, he wore all black and had no face!"
"You two are seriously demented!" Meghan retorted.
"Hey!" Their father snapped in his no nonsense voice that would always shut them up, at least the youngest two. Meghan considered herself above such things as 'parental authority.' "That's enough!"
"He was real!" Jessica returned despite her father's warning to stop. "He didn't have a face and he had octopus arms!-"
"I said that's enough!" Their dad banged his napkin down on the table audibly with his fist. The table shook, one of Meghan's chicken nuggets bounced off her plate and dropped to the floor with a plop. Brownie the Basset Hound was on it in a snorted second.
Their dad picked up his sandwich, resting his elbows on the table, staring at all of them. "Halloween's in a few days guys, and I think you're letting it go to your heads."
"But daddy!-"
"Jessie, you're father's right," Their mom cut Jessica off. "There's no such things as ghosts. Halloween is a fun thing to play with, but none of it is real, okay? So no more scaring each other, am I understood?" She glanced at all three of her children, and when none of them answered she repeated her words: "I said, am I understood?"
Both Jessica and Thomas said: 'yes ma'am," Meghan rolled her eyes but shook her head in agreement, stabbing another nugget right in between its pumpkin eyes, muttering: 'losers' under her breath.
It was a school night, so after dinner Jessica and Thomas both had their baths and were in bed by 8:30. The youngest kids shared a room, and Thomas was snoring away in his own bed with the Batman blanket half an hour after his parents tucked them in.
The door to their bedroom creaked open slowly.
Jessica sat up, but couldn't see who it was because the hallway light wasn't turned on.
She grabbed the pink flashlight by the bed with the sparklers attached to it that was a part of her costume and clicked it on. It didn't illuminate much, only a pinpoint of light a few inches in front of her.
"Jessie."
Jessica saw Meghan approach her in the small amount of moonlight that shone through the curtains, and the small amount of flashlight in her hands.
Something was in Meghan's hand, Jessica's light caught a sparkly reflection, like a diamond.
"Jessica," Meghan's voice sounded weird, like it did when she slept too long on the weekends. "He told me to do it, I don't want to-"
Jessica sat up more and clicked on her little Princess table lamp.
Meghan stood at the end of her bed in flannel boxers and a white tank top, their mom's butcher knife clutched tightly in her hand. Her eyes looked like someone else was home besides her. "But he told me I had to-" Meghan looked Jessica dead in the face and raised the knife.
Jessica screamed, and kept screaming as Meghan took wild slashes at her with the knife.
Their dad burst into the room. "Meghan what are you doing?!"
"I have to kill them! He said I have to kill them!" Meghan screamed like it was a horror movie.
Their dad grabbed Meghan and she started slashing at him; the knife made whooshing sounds in the air.
"Meghan!" Their dad tried to wrestle the knife out of Meghan's hands, but Meghan sliced a gash up his left arm making him cry out and release her.
"David?" Their mom stepped through the door and screamed. Their dad's arm dripped blood onto the carpet.
Thomas was now awake and cowering under his blanket, his screaming muffled under Batman's face.
Meghan's grip suddenly went loose, then she stopped moving entirely. The lights flickered like they did in the park.
Their mom was calling for both Meghan and their dad who was holding tight to his bloody arm and wheezing in pain.
"What's happening?" A pair of eyes peered out from Thomas' blanket; he didn't come out any more than that.
Something went 'scratch, scratch, scratch' like branches against the window by Jessica's bed that had no trees outside it.
Jessica turned her head to the window.
And saw the skinny man from the playground standing right outside it, scratching a sharp thin white finger to the glass, like he was trying to find a way through.
"Mommy…"
Jessica finally got her mother's attention. She wrapping her shirt around their dad's arm, but looked up to the window when Jessica stared at it.
And Jessica knew her mom saw the man too, because her eyes became perfect 'O''s and she screamed just as all the lights went out in the house and the man vanished from the window.