Chapter 6
Photoshop
Dean was patiently waiting, hidden by the trees of the forest, until he saw the door of the house opening, and Leanne going out. She seemed to be pretty busy: she brought a shoulder bag and a couple of books. Walking hurriedly, she took the path towards the village.
When the girl was completely vanished on the horizon, Dean finally went out from his hideout, and he reached the house. He took out an all-purpose knife, thinking how to break the lock without doing too much damage to the door, but he found that the door was already opened.
Astonished, and wondering if Greys have ever heard of thieves or criminals, he pushed it opened and entered.
The room was exactly the same as that morning, and he walked slowly, trying to not trample on anything, or make the objects piled up everywhere fall.
He approached the shelves, that were full of books, mostly novels of every kind, and then he went to the kitchen. It was messy, in the usual disorder of guys with no adult control: vacuum cans and pizza cartons on the floor, together with the wrappers of precooked food, while all the pans where in a corner, useless.
More or less the same kind of disorder that Sam and him left everywhere they stay for more than a day, Dean casually noticed, and he got surprised by his thoughts.
On the big table, in the middle of the room, some books were opened, and they were all underlined and scribbled down in pencil. He approached them to read the titles: they were all university texts. As far as it seemed, Leanne was studying law.
Once again, Dean felt a strange sensation which was impossible to define. It wasn't envy, because, how can he envy something boring like university life? It was more like a vague curiosity for something he knew he would never have, something he lost from the beginning.
He shook his head, wondering what the hell was happening to him, then he moved away, seeing a little door on the right, almost invisible, for it was of the same color of the wall. He opened it slowly and he found himself in the brother's bedroom.
Even if Leanne complained about the disorder of her brother, that morning, Dean didn't have difficulty in recognizing that the messiest corner, the one on the right, was the girl's.
Her bed was untidy, and it was probably used as a desk, too, because there were piled up sheets of papers, pens and even more books. Dean was starting to wonder how many books there were, in such a little house.
On the contrary, on the left, Ethan's corner was really better. He had less things than his sister, an opened notepad, with a pen on it, and three or four books on a shelf.
But the thing that surprised Dean was the wall next to the bed. He approached more, and he noticed that it was made of a huge number of sheets of paper, photos and newspapers. It was similar to their walls, when they were working on a case, but the only difference was that there weren't monsters, missing people or maps.
There were poems, sentences and family photos.
Dean's breath seemed to slowed down on his own initiative. He reached out his hand to take one from the wall, looking at it.
The photo showed two blond children, picked up by a pale woman, who looked surprisingly alike Leanne. Next to her, a man with dark hair had his arm around her waist, smiling. Dean turned the photo. An elegant handwriting wrote: Me, Charlotte, Leanne and Ethan, 1996.
Dean put it away, feeling a lump in his throat. Trying to distract himself, he glanced at the poems all around, almost without seeing them, reading random words which said nothing. He noticed that all of them had the same signature: G. G.
And then, a bit upper, there were another photo of the woman. Dean couldn't help himself from taking that, too, and he had a close look at it. Yes, the mother and the children were as like as two peas in a pod: she had long hair of the exactly same blonde as Leanne, and the same big, blue eyes, of Ethan. She was smiling, looking down.
It took a few second to Dean to understand that Charlotte was clearly pregnant, and she was looking and caressing her belly, with a tender gesture.
Feeling his mouth strangely dry, he turned the photo. This time there were no names or dates, just a poem, written by the same elegant handwriting as before.
The smiling maid, take and shake
Her long sun-coloured hair
Black eyes winking the darkness
And sweetly she whispers, sweetly she asks
Running from all, in the middle of nothing.
Dean found himself reading it over and over again. There were something that didn't quite fit in that, but he just couldn't find it. At the end, he gave up and he attached it on the wall, together with the other photos. He was about to go away, then he turned again, to look at Charlotte's face once again. And he suddenly understood.
He thought of calling Sam, and his hand was already in his jacket, looking for his mobile, when he heard Ethan's voice calling: "Leanne? Leanne, are you at home?"
Dean was caught unaware, because he did the most stupid thing he could do: he went out from the bedroom, and he found himself in the middle of the living room, in front the surprised look of Ethan, caught red-handed in his housebreaking.
However, after the first moment of astonishment, the boy showed a wide smile, and he exclaimed: "You are really back, then!"
He rushed to Dean, shaking his hand, excited, like he didn't notice than an almost complete stranger was alone in his house. "I'm so happy to see you again!" Ethan said, and his eyes were shining with something that Dean recognized as true delight. "I never thought I would see you again... guess what? This morning, after your brother and you went away, I started to compose a poem about how we met!"
"Wh-what?" Dean asked, amazed, going away from the boy's grip.
Ethan started laughing. "Yeah, but I had to stop at once because, you know? I forgot to ask you your names, so I didn't how what to write in the inscription!"
Dean avoided himself commenting, and Ethan's smile became even bigger while he asked: "So? Who are you?"
"I am Dean" he answered, totally shocked from the nonsense of that situation. "And my brother is Sam".
"Dean and Sam..." the young boy whispered, ravished. After a couple of seconds, anyway, he seemed to come back on the Earth and he added: "So, can I do something for you?"
"Ahem... yeah, to be sincere," Dean said, glad that the conversation was coming back to a more understandable level. "This morning when you told us about that forest, you really got me curious. "You said you believe there's some kind of ghost, in it?"
"I don't believe anything" Ethan smiled, and his blue eyes sparkled again. "I know for certain that in this wood there's a kind of... presence".
"Presence?" Dean repeated, frowning.
"A kind of spirit. A non-human entity, of which we can barely imagine the power" the boy explained, and his look got lost above the landscape over the window. "Something nobody has ever seen... something nobody can understand".
"If someone's never seen it, and we can't imagine it, how can you know it exist?" Dean asked, sharply.
Ethan turned again toward him and a big smile shone on his face again. "It was my dad! He told me everything of that he knew... he always had knew it all. He was the best".
Something seemed to lace into Dean's throat, keeping him from talking, but luckily Ethan was too busy in taking a sheet of paper from the wall to notice it.
"He wrote poems" he was explaining. "And he put in his poems everything he thought. 'Always write about the truth' he told me. 'Write what you want the people to know'".
"And he told you about the... spirit in the forest in one of his poems?" Dean asked, finding his voice and, at the same time, trying to follow the logical thread of the conversation, if there were one.
"We poets can see what normal people ignore" Ethan said as an answer. He finally chose one of the papers from the wall, and he gave it to Dean. "Right, read it". Dean looked at it. The poem's title was "Calling".
Slippery voice without an essence
Confused shape, unknown presence
I invoke for your name on the tree's gate
Come take again, your human shape.
Dean gave him back the paper, speechless. Ethan seemed to be satisfied by his silence, and he put it in its place, without stopping himself from smiling.
"Did you see? My father believed there were something in that forest" he explained, thrilled. "Something with a huge power, that it can use at his pleasure of himself and of others. Something impossible to see... to perceive".
Dean was simply puzzled. The poem's words kept coming in his mind over and over again, and every time they had a new meaning, until he felt all the pieces going in the right place.
"Ethan..." he asked, slowly. "That creature isn't the only thing living in the forest, is it? There is something else... or better, someone else. Someone who stay all alone in the middle of the wood."
For the first time, Ethan's smile seemed to waver, and then it vanished. The boy lifted his look toward Dean, confused, and he asked: "How can you know about Sedra?"