Chapter Four
They went back into the house and up the stairs, going back into the hidden bookshelf room where the ghost had done his experiments. Dean almost winced when he remembered her agonizing scream as he looked at the chair she had been strapped to. It seemed to echo in his mind sickeningly. He shook his head, trying to erase the memory but failing miserably.
Sam found the ghost's remains in a large desk drawer meant for files and folders. Apparently the man had stuffed himself in there because his dear old mother told him to when some thieves ransacked their house. They ended up hanging his mom in that very room, just above the desk on a thick nail in the wall. Evidently Violet had looked an awful lot like his mom so he greedily snatched her away and did some things to her. Scientifical mumbo-jumbo, if you asked Dean, but he remembered Sam saying something about memory alterations, which made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
They salted the hell out of his dried up bones and poured some gasoline on them, and to top it off, they threw a lit pack of matches in with it all too. The flames hungrily consumed the remains and as soon as the fire had died down, Dean was already heading back for the car.
He wasn't sure how to explain the sudden desire to watch over Violet. He didn't know why he abruptly felt that cared for her so much. He wondered, too, if maybe she cared for him but wouldn't show it because she was afraid he would ridicule her. But then he would stop himself and think "why the hell am I thinking this stuff?" and move on, shaking his head in confusion.
She was still unconscious when they got back to the car and slid into their respective seats, Dean in the drivers' and Sam in the passengers'. They both looked back at her, twisting around before glancing at each other.
"Do you think she'll be alright?" Sam voiced Dean's exact thoughts, although he wouldn't admit it out loud.
"I…Sammy, I dunno. I hope so," Dean murmured in response, gazing back at Violet's face.
He turned back around to face the steering wheel as the car roared to life when he twisted the key in the ignition. The engine rumbled, purring like a panther stalking its prey as he pulled a u-y and drove down the dirt road until it connected to a paved one. Silence took over the three humans inside the black beast, but it wasn't an awkward kind of quiet. It was a comfortable silence, like the ones that happen when each person is engrossed in their own separate thoughts.
Suddenly a thought dawned on Dean; a disturbing thought, but one he was darkly curious about nonetheless. He sighed, tagging a small grunt at the end of it.
"So, Sam, what do you think that guy did to Violet? You said something about mind alterations...what do you think he did to 'alter' her brain?" Dean asked, momentarily turning his eyes away from the road to glance at his brother.
"Well, uh, in his files - of the ones I could actually translate correctly - it said something about using some weird method to get inside someone's mind. He scribbled down that it didn't hurt almost at all, but...we kinda know that it hurts more than a little." Here Sam paused to glance nervously back at Violet's unconscious form sprawled in the back seat. "What else? Like, did you find out what he gets in there and does when he's screwing around in people's heads?" Dean asked, already feeling a chill creep up his spine. He knew he wasn't going to like the answer and yet he asked anyway. Vicious, that curiosity is.
"From what I could make out, it said that after he got into the victim's mind he would rearrange memories and even erase some. But, before his mother died, he used to use it for good. Like if someone came to him asking to forget a certain memory, like a lost loved one or something that the person wanted gone from their minds, he would find it and erase it just like they asked." Sam paused looking out into the black that blanketed everything. "Sounds like he used to be a nice guy...it's really too bad..." he finished sadly before sighing.
Meanwhile, Dean's mind was far from eased. It resembled a whirlwind of questions unanswerable at the moment, concerns that he hoped would turn to relief, and pure confusion.