Part Four
Sam had long given up hoping for a return to normal.
He'd spent good chunks of his childhood and youth bitching about how far from normal he considered his life to be, and when he walked away it had felt unbelievably good. Like walking into the light.
No sooner had he constructed the normal he wanted though - girlfriend safely asleep in bed, groceries in the cupboard, a bright future on the horizon - than the earth began to shake. His unexpected re-acquaintance with Dean on the floor of the Palo Alto apartment rocked him to his foundations.
In retrospect, though, even that bone-crunching experience seemed more of a slight tremor than the major 7.5 it had felt like at the time.
Sam had managed to steady himself after the seismic event. He'd felt more and more solid as he and Dean bonded. In fact, despite Jess, despite Dad and the whole tainted-blood mess - hell, despite Azazel and Ruby and Lilith, in fact right up to the dying hours of a warm night in New Harmony, Indiana, Sam had been able withstand the still-shifting plates under his feet. But by the time that night came to an end the earth had just plain opened up, and normal had fallen in.
So, when Sam rounded on Jim Broomfield, whose breath he had felt move the hair on the back of his neck, he wasn't exactly surprised that no-one was there.
A little woozy at what he saw, maybe.
Because, yeah, the house looked like it was having its very own own out-of-body experience.
The hall seemed larger then when he'd crossed it moments before, the doors further away, the color of the walls almost painful to look at. It was darker too, although not a sun-going-down kind of dark. This was different. This was a never-any-light-here kind of dark.
Sam knew it well.
He searched his pockets, relieved he had a mag lite but not too impressed with anything else. A small flask of holy water - no use at all right now. Some rock salt shells - no damn use without a gun to fire them from. A small silver-bladed knife in a leather sheath. Pretty, but no damn use.
OK, has this happened before? Did Dad ever come across this?
Sam's backlog of run-ins with the spirit world opened itself quickly at page one. Lucky for him he could speed-read. All the old facts were ready to go, now he just needed all the new facts.
He crossed the hall rug once more. The pattern wasn't moving, exactly, yet it somehow made his eyeballs pulse. He had to look away.
Sam did a quick Q&A with himself.
What do I know?
Jim's not here right now, and Marlena's not here right now. They will both be back.
What do I need to know?
Why they're here. And what I can use to keep them at bay.
He started in the study, which was behaving in the opposite way from the hall. Everything here seemed to be crowding in and he had to resist the urge to back out. The mag lite beam swept around from the doorway, across walls lined with bookshelves to the window. Nothing outside was visible. On the hearth was a coal scuttle and a brush. And a poker, heavy and charcoal-black. The first thing Sam did was scoop it up off the strangely dust-free stone.
Another sweep with the mag lite showed him the desk where Jim Broomfield had been at work, the abandoned wheelchair. Which the old man apparently didn't actually need. He seized the handle of a drawer, pulled it out and emptied the contents on to the floor. Then he followed suit with the other three drawers and dropped to his knees in the middle of the mess, poker under one arm.
He heard voices somewhere, in another room maybe, unclear and disembodied. They were trickling out of the walls like water.
-------
"All right, all right, enough!"
Gina slammed the shotgun back down on the counter.
She was tired of all this. Tired of juggling the medical center job and the stupid Travelstop, tired of North Silverbridge and all the creepy people that kept coming there, tired of being a moonlighting single Mom whose son kept getting beaten up at school.
And she hadn't gotten laid in months. Speaking of, there was something both worrying and powerfully appealing in this Dean guy's eyes, and Gina felt it like a hot flash, an ovary-popping mix of sympathy and desire. Oh boy, he was right on the edge of collapse here and it was tripping all her hopeless-case switches. Whether he had any handle on reality she didn't know, but he was plainly desperate, a human being in dire need of more kinds of help than she guessed she could give.
At any rate, her livid anger at the notion of the Broomfield saga being part of some lunatic tourist trail was beginning to die away in the face of his distress.
"Okay, you can stop the crazy now, Dean. Whatever you say is fine - disappearing house, brother, whatever. Just, look, I'd like to do something about that hand of yours. Why don't you stop frothing at the mouth and come back here for a second, huh? Chester can tell you a nice story to take your mind off the pain."
"I don't have time," he said through his teeth.
"Oh you do, Dean. Trust me, you do, 'cause I don't see you managing much of anything unless you let me help. Ches, get the green box for me would you, hon, and lock the door? Jesus, I fuckin' hate being up here in the dark."
Although he was plainly seething with frustration, she got Dean to come through to the back room and sit in a chair. In the confines of the small interior he smelled of motor-oil and liquor. And like he could do with a good rub-down in the shower. That image hung in her head for way too long and made her grab his injured hand with more energy than she intended.
"Fuck!" he yelped. "You're kidding me, right?"
"Ooops, misjudged your threshold there. Sorry." She shifted down a gear or two, began to unwind the edges of the bandaging carefully. "Ohhhh-kay. You dress this yourself?"
"My brother."
"Huh. Well he did a halfway decent job. I'm guessing you were bitching and complaining the whole time, right?"
Gina's stomach did a few flip-flops when he glared at her.
Oh come on, Gina, not the whole moody, bad-boy trip again. Enough. Fuckin' enough already.
"Chester, could you get Dean a drink of water and some of those Advils from the box please?"
She continued unwinding, aware of the tiny muscle twitching along Dean's jaw, the sweat beading on his forehead. Finally the filthy, oily fabric was off, and she let it slip to the floor. What she could see of the hand was puffy with fluid. As she lifted away the dressing on the palm he turned his head away with a swallow.
It was a mess.
"The water, Ches."
Chester handed over a glass and some pills, then he sat opposite Dean on an upturned box.
"You take these, Dean. I'm going to wash up and then clean this for you. That OK with you?"
Dean nodded. He took the pills, finished the whole glass of water and set it back on the table with his uninjured but unsteady hand. As Gina left for the bathroom she heard him say in a tight growl, "What happened after the fire?"
Then she heard Chester begin. By the time she'd scrubbed-up as much as she could with the remains of a bottle of Walgreens anti-bacterial and come back, Dean was out of the chair.
"You are one difficult patient," she told him. "Would you just sit down? Now? Before you fall down? Jesus."
Her son did her the favor of looking a little guilty for having over-excited someone who was clearly supposed to be sitting quiet. Dean looked a little guilty too. He sank down on the chair again but Gina didn't miss the rueful look that passed between them.
Chester carried on as Gina got to work. "This is back in ninety-something, 'kay? So, just the two of them up here, always been together, he's a botanist or something, no marriages, no kids, just their nephew Jefferson who comes to live with them before he goes to college. Jock of the century. Apple of their eyes and blah blah. Then while he's away, Jefferson dies of some freakin' awful disease and they don't even know. He stops coming to see them and when they find out what happened, it, like, triggers something. They're probably a little psycho anyway, but this ... this sends them over, you know?"
Gina didn't think she'd heard her boy say so many words at a stretch for a very long time.
"The investigation?" Dean's voice sounded a little faint. He had shut one eye as Gina began dabbing around the burned skin at the base of his fingers. She was tempted to tell her son to shut the fuck up right now please, but it seemed that at least the story might take Dean's attention away from what she was doing.
"They didn't even start until a couple of years ago when a hiker guy got away from them. He said - get this ... he said they asked him for help. And they offered him this fresh-baked bread and coffee and all. Before him there'd been five missing guys. Can you believe it? All on the mountain. No bodies found 'til the house went up."
"I can believe it," Dean said. "I can believe almost anything. It's kind of my job." He winced as Gina flashed him a resentful pout. "I'm sorry, but it is."
"Gotta tell you, Dean, I don't like the look of this at all. Here .. where the burns criss-cross ... that's third degree damage, and where it's blowing up, that's second degree, and then you're all ... and with the stupid auto-repair it's probably infected. I'll put on some ointment, but that's not really gonna do jack shit. You need antibiotics, heavy-duty, maybe a bionic hand down the line. You're certainly a candidate for a burn specialist. How does it feel now?"
"Tell me about the fire."
"Your hand's burned to a fuckin' crisp and you want a story about a fire? Are you going to tell me why I'm bothering to do this?"
Dean's eyes shut briefly again. His tongue came out and he licked at his dry bottom lip. "Because you're a sucker for sick puppies?"
A spasm of laughter caught at her midriff but she suppressed it.
Yeah. Sick, moody, bad-boy puppies.
"I could put a splint on. Might help although you won't be able to use it."
Dean pushed the hand towards her. "Just wrap it, tight as you like."
"Okay. Your funeral."
"The fire?" Dean prompted again.
Chester rocked forward, squeezing his hands between his knees. "Okay, so the cops are running their investigation and everybody in this dumb place is all like oh I've always been suspicious of them because they had this real obsessive, weird ... y'know, thing about the nephew and they were so fu- they were so wasted, and not because he was dead, noooo - they were pissed 'cause he stopped comin' to visit."
Dean was breathing like he was trying to inhale Chester's words. Gina could feel that he was about to get up again and that this time he wasn't going to agree to sit. She'd heard this awful story a hundred times before; couldn't ever understand Chester's interest in it.
"Did they find the Broomfields?"
"Like I said, they knew the cops were coming and they decided to flame out."
"Right. Locked in the cellar. But their bodies - they find their bodies?"
Gina finished off the wrapping, tapped Dean's wrist with two fingers to show him she was done and that she didn't like his line of questioning, then stood back a step and folded her arms.
"Are they still under the house, Chester?" Dean asked.
Gina made a noise of disbelief. This guy ... he was a nightmare. A total, fucking nightmare. And - why, oh why, God? - completely, insanely hot.
Chester flicked his eyes to her, and then back to Dean. "Far as I know. Don't think anybody bothered to dig 'em up." His eyes opened wide then, like he was seeing something written on Dean's face. "Hey, you see something up there? You didn't see ... them? Like ... dead them?" He looked enjoyably freaked and Gina was really pissed. Really pissed that something like this should bring him out of himself when all her efforts had failed.
"I think that's really enough, Dean. Chester will tell this tale to all comers, but I've had just about as much as I can take of the Broomfields and fuckin' weird people asking about them."
"No, but, Mom," Chester got in real quick. "Just one more thing ... this is really cool. There's this website -"
"Oh my God, I knew it ..."
"Hold on, let me tell you. It is kinda weird, but it's cool too. There's all the stuff about what happened and the victims and then there's this game you can play. With the house. Like it's a virtual Broomfield house and you can go in it and they come and try and get you. It ... it ... it's cool."
Chester finally ran out of steam.
Dean had got to his feet. "Tell me you have a laptop," he said, "I wanna play that freakin' game right now."
Gina could see by the shine in her son's eyes that he thought Dean was the coolest thing since ice.
------
When Sam heard the voices clearer, out in the hall like they were summoning him, he moved on, poker in hand.
He'd found plenty of facts.
Jefferson's whole life, from womb to tomb. Photographs, baby teeth, locks of hair, drawings, letters, certificates, schoolbooks, cards and agendas, his every visit and contact marked with a flourish and in capital letters. JEFF ON FRIDAY! JEFF BIRTHDAY! JEFF CALLING! The drawers of the room were stuffed full of Jefferson. Nothing and nobody else. The papers didn't break up in Sam's hands, exactly, but they felt fragile as ashes.
Across the hall in the kitchen, there was certainly no coffee. No bread either. The old-fashioned range was sparkling and cold and there was nothing but the sharp, stagnant stink of - Sam swallowed it down. Yeah, that would be dead people. It had been hanging around behind the tragedy and madness but it was strong in here. Strong enough to make his gut roil.
The dead people were the ones in the walls, too, like crackling voices on old transistor radio sets. And they weren't the only ones, because the Broomfields had stuff on their minds, too. Whenever they weren't actually present, in all their grim otherworldliness, they kept saying Sam's name as if he were a naughty boy playing hide and seek.
There were three chairs at the wooden table whose surface was pale and scrubbed clean. It was uncovered, marked by ridges which looked like they'd been sanded repeatedly. Like it was a big chopping board. By the door to outside were two metal pails. Wooden-handled implements lay soaking under a surface of pink, soapy water.
Across the kitchen was another door, unpainted, with an old-fashioned brass latch instead of a handle. He tried the latch but the door was evidently locked from the inside, what sounded like a metal chain clanking when he pushed.
Okay, you don't want me in there, so that's where I'm going.
He had just measured up a hit on the latch with his poker when the volume of voices notched up dramatically.
"Damnit, Sam," Marlena said as she slipped through the wall nearly in front of him. She had something in her hand that he couldn't make out but he didn't have time to consider what it was. He swung the poker away from the door and towards her like he was batting a home run out of the park, split her right through the shoulders. She shuddered into a shower of black, dissipating in a couple of seconds.
Sam decided to re-locate again for the time being, exited the kitchen, crossed the hall and took the stairs two at a time.
What had to be Jefferson's room was the first he came to on the top landing.
College pennant over the bed. Books everywhere, books and boots. Pairs and pairs of boots.
Some were dirty, covered in grit and mud. They were piled in a corner, a mess of laces and upturned soles and he moved them gingerly with a foot. The carpet was in need of a good vacuum. It looked like half the mountain had been tracked in, a strange contrast to the clean of the rest of the house. There was a mound of clothes on the floor by the window and six watches lined up on the nightstand.
Sam couldn't figure out whether this room was a shrine or a dumping ground.
There was the thumping sound of feet ascending the stairs.
It was weird. He'd been facing up to ghosts since forever, and every last one of them freaked the hell out of him.
But he wasn't freaked now.
------
It couldn't possibly have been any darker on the mountain than it was when Dean got back out there. The chill couldn't possibly have set in so wickedly. And the weakness in his hand, arm and whole right side couldn't possibly have felt more debilitating.
He parked the Impala up between the trees, left the headlights on so the beams swept right over the clearing at low level, highlighting the bumpy terrain, the bugs and the emptiness.
"What the hell, Sam," he said as he popped the trunk. "What the hell, what the freakin' hell, Sammy."
He'd gotten Gina to load up the duffel for him, with salt, flashlight, shotgun, shells, Zippos and enough fuel to start some serious deforestation. She'd called him every name under the sun but she'd still done it. He slung the duffel over one shoulder, nearly staggered under the weight, rooted for the pick-ax and a shovel. Somewhere in his mind's eye - which, honestly, was the eye he distrusted most - was the three-dimensional, computerized Broomfield house. It was probably completely inaccurate. Almost certainly not properly to scale. But it was positively the only thing he had to go on.
He sincerely hoped Sam was working stuff out in his big brain, supposing it was still attached to the rest of him, because he didn't think much of his brother's chances with only a one-armed auto mechanic to rely on.
Dean gave it some thought, but he didn't take a slug of whiskey. It might have been the first time in half a year that he hadn't done so before heading into a hunt.
And some kind of weird shit this hunt was, that was having him try and dig for bones in the dark at ten thousand freakin' feet above sea level.
He made a conscious effort to focus, got his bearings using the trees. There were supposed to be four, all the same, in an unruly line about ten good paces to the right of where the front door had been, and hopefully still was. He dropped the duffel at the point he was going to call the front door, wrestled it open with an unwieldy hand and elbow, dumped out everything except the shotgun.
It occurred to him that a disappearing ghost house could probably reappear again whenever the hell it liked, and he wondered what that would be like. You know, if he happened to be standing right where a wall was or whatever.
He walked several feet, arms full of tools, said "carpet" out loud, glancing up minutely as if he expected to see the brass chandelier swinging above his head, shut his eyes quickly to get a visual of the ground floor. The House of Horrors game had located the kitchen diagonally opposite the room where Jim Broomfield had spilled out of his chair.
And, from memory, if he entered the kitchen around here - he dragged a rough line in the earth using the shovel - then the cellar door should be around ... Dean bent his head in a silent laugh. He was feeling a little crazed now, drunk on pain and anxiety.
"Tell me you're here, Sam," he said, and let everything he had hold of drop to the ground.
He mentally ran through the game again. Front door, hallway, study, check. Stairs, kitchen, cellar, check.
"Cellar door, Sammy. I'm at the cellar door."
He looked at his boots, took a breath.
Standard salt and burn, son. Don't waste time, just put your goddamn back into it.
Yeah, thanks for the advice, Dad. Think I can take it from here.
He bent to grab hold of the handle of the pickax, gripped it hard in both hands. The first impact made his eyes water, even though his strike had been tentative to say the least.
"Sonofabitch," he squeezed out through gritted teeth.
Then he swung again and this time put his goddamn back into it.
tbc