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Up next: Sam meets the ghost.
Sam thought about what he'd seen of the ghost. Even now, his stomach turned a bit. "Ghosts are like an echo. They get distorted by whatever's keeping them here, but their apparitions are clues to what happened to them."
"Please," said Jacob. "Enlighten us. What exactly happened to that?"
"I have no idea," Sam whispered.
..
...
..
Only a lifetime of experience and the chill in the air told Sam what he was seeing was a ghost at all.
Spilling down the wall was a lumpy slide of pallor and corruption. It hadn't been there a moment ago. He might have thought it was more ecto, except that it was too thick and, barely, too solid. Too still. It could not be termed a figure. It looked like someone had slopped fat and hairs from a drain and colorless flesh down a wall. Nothing obviously human or even animal stood out about it, except that it was breathing.
Sam wasn't.
His mind blanked utterly of anything but the knowledge that he had nothing. No weapon, no tool, no shelter. If it came, he couldn't even run.
At first, the spirit's breathing was only visible, and only barely. Then it became audible; then it became louder; and then the dark mat at the top lifted and Sam realized that it was its head. The breath-sounds hitched. The malformed head-knob half-lifted again, fell again. It bobbed a couple more times, and ribbons of matter spread over the wall quivered.
Sam was just beginning to wonder how a thing that had no feet or even visible skeleton would move when the entire pile seemed to sigh and began to slip sideways along the wall, towards him.
He shrank back into the corner. The ghost followed. Sam darted forward and away from Jacob and Lindsey, keeping unconsciously close to the wall and the light it afforded. The thing hanging down the wall paused, then reversed direction and slid slowly over the wall and after him.
The ecto was glowing brighter, but it was still damned dark in here and Sam couldn't see the thing clearly. When its mass parted over the leaky pipe that had woken him early, he was glad.
Sam stopped about halfway down the platform and swallowed, waiting to see what would happen. The others were saying something, he was pretty sure, but he couldn't really hear them past the pressure on his ear drums. The ghost stopped when it drew level with him.
After a moment, when all it did was sit there, Sam found himself taking a step towards it. He stared at it. The head-knob thing hung down so the face wasn't visible. At least, he thought it was the head. It seemed to be, from the mat of what he hoped was hair, except that the shape was wrong and he knew, with sickening certainty, that it wasn't really big enough. It jerked once.
He stumbled when he retreated. It was such a civilian thing to do, but he couldn't take his eyes off the thing and, truly, it didn't even matter—graceful or graceless, he had nowhere to go. So he stayed where he fell, staring at the spirit, as fascinated as he was repelled.
Then it climbed down off the wall.
Or slid down off the wall. Sam didn't even know how to parse the movement, or the trail of not-there mucus it left behind. It moved in fits and starts along the floor, a living carpet of lumps and knobs that wasn't even thick enough to be a body, what the hell was this thing, and his heart hammered as he scrambled backwards on his ass and elbows.
Ghost-flicker broke up the thing's long, slow crawl towards him. Christ, it was cold, and Sam became aware that his limbs were growing clumsy again and that his thoughts were slowing with them, and then his hands found the end of the platform. There was nowhere left to go.
It was at his feet now. The head-knob moved restlessly, flickering. One moment he thought maybe it had arm-stumps; the next it was an incoherent pile of meat. It picked up its head. Where a face should have been, there was only void that had necrosed away down to the back of a skull.
It began to climb him.
The sensation was much the same as any other spirit attack, at first, except that where spirits usually reached for the heart or lungs or throat, this one seemed to pour itself into all of him. Despite knowing there was nowhere left to go, Sam instinctively tried to move away. It didn't matter. All that came out of his limbs was a short convulsion.
He saw the twisting mass of the spirit ripple up and over his face. Cold paralyzed him everywhere from his toes to the root of his tongue. Then it pressed into his head.
Panic so involuntary that it didn't even seem like his edged up his throat. Blinding pain began to build as he fought the intrusion, a slow, passionless, single-minded pressure as inexorable as water through a clogged pipe. Sam flashed on an image of what water eventually did to all cracks, and then it was through.
Sam walked backwards. Sun was warm on his face, gold dappled with green until he was back out on a street, cars going by the wrong way around him.
Slip.
"Brendan Whitmore was not what you'd call an overachiever. His sister's cute, though. You?"
"Bupkis."
Slip.
A priest was looking at him, shock and recognition in his eyes. Sam took hold of his head by the hair and drove his face into the concrete step where it was already obliterated into red pulp and a spreading stain. Then again, and the stain was smaller. Then again, and again, and again, until it was whole again—
"Well, come in, then," the priest said, and climbed the unmarked steps.
The Other lost interest. Slip.
Sam lay on his side, listening in the darkness, while Dean breathed too quietly in the next bed. He was close enough Sam could reach out and touch him.
Dean—he'd done something to Dean—he remembered the curiosity, and then he felt the curiosity, and then something felt the curiosity for him, and he saw Dean, Dean arching off the floor, in the dark, in the dirt, with needles in his mouth and his eyes full of blood, and was it him tingling with excitement, or something else?
Someone pressed at him. Pressed, and pressed, and pressed, but No, this isn't how I'm going to find out—
"Maybe we should just burn the place."
"Yeah, or maybe not, Dean, because who knows what Rufus even has in here," Sam said, absorbed in shelves, taking books, taking talismans, taking a thick volume bound in brown leather from a desk drawer. It was none of his business, but he was curious and besides—
Slip. "Believe me when I tell you that the things you don't know? Could kill you."
"I feel like I got slipped the worst mickey of all time and woke up to find out I burned the whole city down."
"It wasn't you."
You're lying.
There was someone in here with him. "Who are you?"
They didn't answer. He couldn't see them, couldn't hear them. He could only feel their fingers in his brain, prying apart the folds and looking for something. If he could just separate them from himself, then maybe he could wrench them out, but they threaded themselves through every movement like fat in a muscle.
The cop's head whipped back under his fist. Sam followed him down to the ground. The blows were all huge, with plenty of wasted motion, really the efficient thing would have been just to snap the man's neck, but he wasn't any kind of physical threat and Sam was restless, bored, and it felt good to hit the body beneath him again and again and again.
Slip.
Sam was in Jacob Dorner's apartment. He wanted to stay in that memory, there was something important in it, but someone else was controlling his body and it slipped away in a blur until he was in a church crypt instead, examining the delicate, parsley-like leaves under his fingers. Artemisia vulgaris, his mind obediently supplied, but this wasn't what the Other was looking for, and he just had time to think Wrong kind of wormwood before a surge of someone else's frustration carried him out of that memory, too.
He tumbled. Memories rose up, were angrily struck down, were slit open and pried into and Sam walked backwards along a street in Providence. He passed docks, flashing oar blades. Sunlight warmed his shoulders through his suit jacket. He passed buses, doughnut shops, graven letters that spelled In Deo Speramus.
But Sam didn't. He had all his life, right up to the moment he'd jumped, even as he'd fallen—but then he'd woken up in the panic room, mind a neatly plastered blank for everything after dead graveyard grass and Dean's ruined face and one moment of perfect peace, and found that he just didn't.
He felt the Other more obtrusively now. It tried to wrench him backwards from the lip of the pit and to the hot metal of the car through jeans as he held Dean down over the hood and drew back his fist, to the moment when he and Lucifer were neither two nor one and time splintered into a thousand different rays but that wasn't what made the Other grip him and try to delve deep and intimate, like it deserved to see this, like it had any right.
Anger boiled up in Sam like storm surge. There had been a time when it had been at his command, before he'd realized how much he was at its. They'd done great things together.
Sam took hold of the probing fire in his mind and wrenched.
Inhuman screams rent the air. Human screams did, too.
Sam lay gasping on the concrete, his head hanging off the end of the platform, neck strained, looking into darkness and the dim outline of the far wall. He managed to turn onto his side and then up onto his knees, and what he saw was the ghost-thing twisting on the floor, retreating, and the ecto burning where it poured from the walls, throbbing bright orange.
Sound filled the chamber. The ghost was screaming. Marian was screaming with the ghost. Jacob was screaming about how he wasn't going to get skull-fucked again, let it just try, and Lindsey was screaming at Jacob to shut up. Sam watched the spirit move in ripples and jerks until it found the wall. Then it flickered, squelched, and folded itself away into some other dimension.
Wishing he could afford to throw up again, Sam squeezed his eyes shut against a blinding headache that he didn't want to admit was familiar. Marian's cries died down to moans. He staggered to his feet and away from the edge of the platform.
"What—the hell—was that?" he panted.
Lindsey and Jacob's shouting match cut out. "Sam? Is that you?"
He dropped heavily into the corner between Jacob's pipe and Marian and Lindsey's. He swallowed. His mouth was very dry. "I think so."
"Where is it?" Jacob sounded on the brink of hysteria. "Where'd it go?"
"Think it left," Sam croaked. "For now." His pulse was still racing from the surge rage. It ticked down in his neck like a cooling engine. The sensation was not novel. It always used to feel like this, after he—
"What do you mean, it left?" Lindsey's voice was hard. "Why did it leave?"
"It—" Sam raked a shaking hand through his hair. The roots were greasy. God, he wanted a shower. All he wanted was a shower and Dean. He laughed ruefully. "You were right, after all. It came to visit me."
"And then it just left?"
He took a moment before answering her, trying to sift through the experience. "It was in my head." He remembered—shit. That memory from Bristol, again, of beating the cop half to death and enjoying it. Conversations with Dean. Irrelevant strolls through Providence, like something was rewinding his life in his head. Something—something he had done to Dean, didn't know whether he wanted more to remember or to forget—
He remembered meeting Father Reynolds in a confused jumble. He'd passed the church from that old case on the way to Jacob's apartment. That much he was reasonably certain had really happened. But the rest— Oh, God. Had he really killed him? That couldn't be real, couldn't be. What about the rest, then? Had the old priest recognized him at all? Spoke to him? Had he imagined the entire encounter?
The whole day was hazy in his memory. The only time he'd been able to see anything clearly was when the ghost was looking at it through him.
Lindsey was calling his name, sounding pretty pissed off about it. "What?"
"I said, and then what?"
"I threw it out. What the hell was that? Ghost possession I've felt before, and this was nothing like that."
"What in the hell do you mean, you threw it out? How?"
Sam blinked at the mounting fury in her voice. "I don't know. I just did. It wasn't easy." He didn't feel like touching on his resume of special talents.
"He's lying," said Jacob.
"What? Why would I?" Oh, Jesus, was this going to be a psychic dick-measuring thing?
"No one else has ever done that before," Lindsey said. "How did you?"
"I told you, I don't know. I just— It was trying to look at something, a memory, that I didn't want it to see, and I got angry and forced it out."
"Right." Her voice was clipped. "Or you've been in league with it this whole time."
"Did you really just say 'in league with it'?"
"He's lying," Jacob said again. "It left to go grab someone else or something. No one could do that."
"You said you're the Ghostbusters, but I don't see any rescue coming. What are you really doing here, Sam?"
Sam counted to ten. It wasn't her fault; the stress of being trapped for months on end had to cause untold psychological damage, to say nothing of regularly repeated spirit possession. Even the most well adjusted person on the planet would be paranoid by now. Or maybe she had just been a fucking asshole to begin with, who knew. "Exactly what I told you, Lindsey. Believe me or not, I can't force you."
She was right about one thing: there was no sign of Dean. That could just mean he hadn't found them yet. It probably meant that. Sam hoped it meant that, and he refused to think about the possibility that Dean had already found the ghost and been no better prepared for it than Sam had, only for it to decide that Hotel California had no vacancies.
He licked his lips and thought suddenly, vividly, of the leaky pipe, and he knew it was time. Clean or not, he had to have water.
The ecto was still glowing brightly enough that he didn't have to grope along the wall; he could see the pipe and the puddle of his vomit beyond it. A cockroach scuttled away from the latter as he approached.
"Sam? Sam?"
He squatted before the pipe, counting. Drops of water welled from the rounded tip of the concrete filling at a rate of about once every two seconds. It would have to do. Awkwardly, ignoring Lindsey's calls, he maneuvered himself until his head was under the pipe and opened his mouth.
He felt like a hamster. The spirit's attack had been invasive, but this was degrading. Sam shut his eyes and thought about making it out of here to see Dean again.
It tasted alright, at least. It was hard to tell, because the whole sewer was so putrid, and his sense of smell had long since exceeded what it could process and given up—ha—the ghost, but it was possible that the materials choking his water supply were also filtering it. It didn't much matter, at this point. He had to drink.
"He pass out again?"—Jacob talking to Lindsey.
"The hell should I know?"—Lindsey replying.
"No way he forced it out. You said he fainted when it just came to visit me, never mind him."
Lindsey snorted. "Yeah, and you've been Superman up to now."
Sam swallowed one mouthful, two, three. Then he let some water fall in his cupped hands and washed them as best he could. He returned to the corner by the others.
"If anyone's in league with it, it's you, you bitch," Jacob threw back. "You've been alive down here how long? And you really expect me to believe you've been living off that goop on the walls?"
Sam had questions about that, himself, but they could wait. "You were right," he said before Lindsey could reply. "It's looking for something. What is it looking for?"
"Thought you were the expert."
"Expert?" Jacob asked suspiciously. "Expert in what?"
"Well, you see, Jake, while you were getting reamed by Casper—"
Sam's head throbbed. "Supernatural phenomena. If you've had nightmares about it, it's real. Except Bigfoot and Donald Trump's hair. We're called hunters. My brother and I came here because people have been disappearing mysteriously in Providence since at least 1963, almost twenty that I know of. There's something connecting all of you."
"You say that like you're so sure," Lindsey spat. "An hour ago you were sure it wouldn't come for you."
"I'm sorry, I'm still hung up on supernatural expert," Jacob said.
"Yeah, you would be," Sam muttered.
"How do you know we're connected?" Lindsey asked again. "The last thing I can remember from before is leaving the nursing home for lunch. Jacob said he was running or something. And he's not even from here. Then there's you, and all I know about you is that you're nuts."
"Even if it's decided to try to use me, I don't think I'm part of the pattern. I was just in the wrong place."
"What place was that?"
"I can't remember, and that's bugging the hell out of me. I'm pretty sure I'd just come out of Jacob's apartment—"
"You broke into my apartment?"
"—but everything around when it took me is just really fuzzy. It's like it fried my brain when it took me. Sounds like it did that to all of us." Mutters of agreement. "Look, I'm not saying you did anything to make it take you. But it chose you for a reason."
"Yeah. Because it's insane."
"Probably. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a reason. It might not be a reason that would make sense to anyone else, but there'll be one somewhere. Spirits—they get confused. It's like they get so hung up on one idea that they become blind to anything else." Cramps were starting to pinch at his stomach, though they were mild for now. "And this one… whatever else it is, it's motivated."
"Why does he keep talking about it like it's a person?" Jacob asked Lindsey.
"Because he thinks it's a dead one."
"There was nothing human about that," Jacob said flatly.
Sam thought about what he'd seen of the ghost. Even now, his stomach turned a bit. "Ghosts are like an echo. They get distorted by whatever's keeping them here, but their apparitions are clues to what happened to them."
"Please," said Jacob. "Enlighten us. What exactly happened to that?"
"I have no idea," Sam whispered.
They all slept for a while. At least, Sam tried. He thought he understood why Litner had chosen to die on the stairs, now, if that had been a choice: it was hard to close your eyes anywhere near the wall when you knew the spirit appeared from there, but to just curl up in the middle of the floor went against instinct at a base, animal level. It was cold, and it was exposed. And the ghost, when it came, would find him there just as surely.
Sam knew he needed to sleep and that now, just after a visitation, was the best time to do it. They should be safe for a few hours, if he hadn't pissed it off too much. But ultimately, what pulled him under was rock-bottom blood sugar and the fact that there was nothing else to do.
He woke… who knew when, really? That was the bastard of it. He'd read the studies, seen a few victims, and knew, in a broad, intellectual way, what the absence of any meaningful time markers could do to a human being, psychologically. But that didn't prepare him for the fact that it was starting to affect him already.
What maybe bothered him most was this itch at the back of his brain, like this was actually familiar.
He'd gone to sleep propped up in the corner where he talked to the others. That, too, was probably down to animal instinct: sleep near the herd. He wondered if Lindsey and Marian slept together, not for anything sexual, but for warmth. They probably did. It might have been partly how they'd survived for so long.
Sam grunted when he stretched out his legs. His right knee didn't pop anymore, he'd noticed.
A rustling sound filtered through the grate at his left. "Sam?" It was very low, almost a whisper. Sam felt absurdly like he was talking covertly with a classmate at preschool naptime. "That you?"
"Yeah. S' me."
They breathed in the quiet for a few minutes. "Sorry I bugged out on you earlier." Jacob's voice was hollow. "Been sort of a stressful couple of days."
Sam sat, staring into at the dark. "Yeah."
"Did you really throw it out?"
"Yeah."
Dorner's voice was almost plaintive. "How?"
Sam swallowed. "It's easier when you've had some practice."
"What do you—?"
"Never mind. Just… not my first rodeo, okay. We'll get through this." What he did not say, and did not particularly want to dwell on, was that he wasn't sure he'd be able to eject the ghost more than once. And its interest in his memories could pose difficulties for him that it did not for the others.
Don't scratch the wall.
"We should talk, all of us." They should, urgently, but Sam felt bone-tired, and in this momentary hush, he couldn't bring himself to mount another attempt at a rally. "Compare notes and try to understand what it wants."
"Will that change anything?"
Sam exhaled. "Depends on what it wants."
"What was it like, for you?"
Absently Sam picked at the crud under his fingernails. "A lot like you and Lindsey described. It was reviewing my memories. I could get a read on it, sometimes, but just broad strokes: anger, frustration. Interest. Definitely more interest in some memories than others."
"Yeah? Like what?"
The ones where I didn't have a soul. The ones where I dangled my brother like meat on a hook. That one time when I was kind of Satan.
"Violent ones," he settled on, finally. "You?"
Dorner seemed to have thought about this since they'd last discussed it. "Everyday stuff, mainly. Lindsey talked about it walking around in her, and that's mainly what it did."
Sam wondered if Jacob's answer was any more truthful than his own. He hoped so. They couldn't all have had a turn being possessed by the Devil in here, could they?
Instead of pressing, he settled for talking. "Mostly it was like it was flipping through channels, but sometimes, with enough effort, I could take back the remote. It got pissed off when I did that, but I think it pissed it off more when it didn't find whatever it was looking for. It's like… It's like it expects us to know something."
"Yeah, but what? I dreamt a lot of memories, but it was mostly just stupid stuff: walking around town, jogging, going to the gym, being in my apartment. Why dig through our memories, anyway? If it wants to find something, why not just go out there and look?"
"Been thinking about that. I think it's bound to the sewers. I'm not sure how—most spirits are actually a lot more geographically limited than that. But it explains how it could take all of us from all over the city. We either wandered too close to a sewer opening or it lured us there."
"Lured us? Like mind control?"
"Yeah. That's, um. That's a thing for a lot of spirits. Sorry."
Silence for a few.
"So, ghosts."
"Yup."
"Like. Lots of them?"
Sam laughed quietly. "More than you'd think, yeah."
"What makes them come back?"
"Honestly? Nobody's really sure." Sam shifted, trying to get comfortable on the concrete. "It's not so much that they come back as that they never really go. So, if they stick around, it's because they have some kind of unfinished business. Violent death is the most common kind. Murdered, and the killer got away with it." He stared at a scab on his knee in the silence. Plink. "Based on what I saw, something like that's a pretty good guess for this one."
Little as he liked to, he tried to remember exactly how it had looked. Gender, age, species had been obliterated in what conception it had left of itself. It wasn't a figure, it was a pile. If the apparition was any record of what physically had happened to his or her body, then they had been taken apart. More than once. "Something bad happened to this ghost, man."
"Yeah, but—" Dorner sounded uncomfortable. "People get murdered every day. I mean, Providence has something like twenty every year. They can't all be coming back from the dead, can they?"
"They aren't. Like I said, nobody really knows why some people stay when some people don't, but it's a choice they make, not to move on. Anger's the most common reason, but sometimes it's something else. Sometimes it even starts as something good. Like a desire to protect someone."
He hadn't thought about that night in the old Lawrence house in months. No—years. There was an extra year between now and the trip Cas had sent them on into the past that he didn't have, and even now that kept tripping him up.
She'd been so beautiful. It was functionally the first time he'd ever met her. For months afterward, remembering the way she'd looked at him could fuel enough anger to swing a machete through a vampire's trunk.
Sam, I'm sorry.
"Sam? Sam!"
"Yeah, um. Sorry." He wiped a hand down his face, then wished he hadn't. "Spaced out. Jacob, have you eaten anything yet?"
Long pause to that. "No. Not— No."
"I think… I think we're gonna have to."
"You said your buddy was going to come and get us out of here. You said."
"He will, Jacob, but he has to find us first. He won't stop looking, no matter what." So long as he's alive. "But look, I was looking for you guys when I was taken, and to be honest? I wasn't close to finding you." He glossed over the part where they'd been about to pack up and leave with the job undone. "Dean will come, but it won't matter if we're dead."
The head rush when he stood nearly put him back on the floor, but he fought it off until his vision cleared. He wouldn't let his brother come here in vain.
"Wondered when you'd get hungry enough." Lindsey's voice was rough with sleep.
Sam looked at the biggest spill of ecto on the wall. "'Hungry' isn't necessarily the word I'd use."
"You're lying," Dorner said. "You have to be. No way you've been alive down here this long on—on whatever that is. It's feeding you."
Drowsy amusement colored her answer. "Roaches aren't as bad as you'd think. They all seem to come up here, too. Told you our room was the best."
Cockroaches. Okay, that wasn't so bad. Better than the prospect of the ecto, in a lot of ways; he and Dean had done their share of experimentation with grubs and beetles in their days of basic survival training. Ah, boyhood.
"I've— Look, I've eaten those, alright?" Jacob burst out. "You happy? I ate the fucking roaches. But there aren't enough of them."
"Yeah, well, maybe people don't live very long in your room."
"Enough, Lindsey," Sam said. "Look, clearly there's enough calories around to at least keep us going. If you're short, I'll… bring you some of whatever's available in here."
He'd just volunteered to bring somebody dead insects as presents, like some kind of deranged house cat. Great.
"Is there anything else, Lindsey?"
"We never seem to run out of rats. The corpses are a draw, I think."
Well. That he truly wasn't hungry enough for.
"I haven't seen any," said Jacob. Sam had a sudden picture of himself stuffing dead rats through the grate to Dorner's pipe. Jesus. He really was turning into a house cat. Part hamster, part Dory, part actual fucking house cat.
He thought of Dean. Whatever it took.
"One thing at a time. Rats and roaches could carry just about anything, but I guess the ecto should be clean. About as clean as anything in here, anyway."
"I'm not eating that," Jacob said.
"You've been down here two days longer than I have and you've eaten a handful of insects. Tell me you're not feeling it already." Dorner had no answer to that. "Look, it's simple: you'll get weaker. Then you'll get weaker. You'll fall asleep, slip into a coma, and die. Is that really what you want? To die down here, when there's finally someone looking for us who has a chance of solving this thing?"
Sam walked over to the biggest patch of ecto. It had dimmed, somewhat, since the ghost's departure, but it still glowed and oozed slightly. It covered an area maybe a foot wide and streamed all the way down to the floor, pooling in the join.
He simply could not believe that human beings put this in their mouths.
"We're trapped here, for now." It cost an effort to keep his voice clear and strong, like he wasn't having serious fucking misgivings about this. "If the one thing I can do to help my brother right now is stay alive, then that's what I'm going to do. Jacob, are you with me?"
One. Two. Three. Four. Then, grudging, uncertain: "Yeah. Fine, let's do this thing."
"Alright. Uh. Any particular recommendations here, Lindsey?"
"Nah." She was laughing, but had the decency to try to hide it. "I promise not to tell if you use the wrong fork."
Sam steeled himself, then he pressed his fingers into the thickest bubble of ecto. It was warmer than he'd expected, and the consistency as it came away from the wall was somewhere between rubber cement and slime mold. He swallowed his rising gorge.
"Eeurrrrghhhhhhhhh," said Jacob, long and heartfelt.
"Okay. We'll. We'll just, um. Get a good handful, here." Sam tried to get the flap of the stuff to part from the wall.
"This isn't, like. Toxic, is it?"
"More toxic than starving?" Sam asked. They didn't have to know that the question was sincere.
"Whatever you're imagining it tastes like, it's worse," Lindsey put in helpfully.
"Alright. We'll do this together. Alright, Jacob?"
"Yeah. Sure."
"On the count of three. One. Two. Three."
She was right: it was worse than he had imagined.
"Oh, holy fuck, that's puke-worthy."
"Keep it down, Jacob," Sam said, eyes watering as he swallowed. "Otherwise we'll just have to eat more of it." Shuddering all over, he scooped up another helping.
After a few minutes, when his stomach was roiling but no longer digesting itself and the sounds of revulsion had tapered off from Jacob's direction, Sam decided enough was enough. It cost an effort, but he made himself lick his fingers clean.
"You boys all done?"
Sam sank down to hug his knees. He felt queasy, queasy and odd. Sort of… floaty. "Yeah. Yeah, I think so."
Lindsey's voice wafted down to them. "You are in for the trip of your life."