Author's Note: Sorry. This took longer than expected. I got crazily busy.

But, on the plus side, I should be free for the next couple of weeks, so posts will be going up regularly. ;-)

Anyone who's following Our Echoes Roll, that will start up again over the weekend. I do plan to tag Adventures in Babysitting, but it might take a couple of days to get to it.

So, two questions: Who else loved Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes in the new movie? And who else is hoping that this week's Supernatural episode turns out a lot better than last week's?

Many thanks to everyone who reviewed: criminally charmed, SandyDee84, StarKid McFly, sammynanci, shelleluver, sandycub, Whateva876, Sam, SPN Mum, Tendencia, PutMoneyInThyPurse, giacinta, BerrySPNFMA, CeCe Away, Kirabaros, scootersmom, doyleshuny, BranchSuper and Eavis.

Thanks to Cheryl and SandyDee84, for all the help!

To be honest, this chapter bugged me a bit. Once I started, I realized how hard it was to put the boys in this story.

Chapter IX: How Does Your Garden Grow?

I take a minute to look around. We're at the end of a huge but dingy hallway. There's a window next to us; the curtains are drawn back, giving us a clear view of the night sky. There's something swooping around outside – owls, maybe, or bats. Whatever they are, they're creepy. This whole place is creepy.

There are doors lining the hallway on either side, but I don't particularly want to open them. I wouldn't be surprised if Frankenstein's monster were lurking behind one of them. The air smells of cobwebs and dust and other things that even I don't particularly want to think about. There's a storm brewing: I can hear the wind howling like a pissed-off banshee who's just been introduced to the business end of a hunter's rifle.

Worst of all, we're both wearing nightgowns. And not those Greek nightgowns that at least had the advantage of having been worn by a lot of totally badass soldiers, but the kind of nightgowns you see in old movies where dudes wearing them are marching up and down staircases with candles that are a freaking fire hazard.

Not PJs. Nightgowns.

I'm about to tell Sam he's an idiot and this is all his fault when a door just behind him opens. A girl in a dress and apron bustles out. She looks about sixteen, and happier than any sane person should be able to look in this miserable rathole and this horrible weather.

She bobs a curtsey, giving me a prim nod and Sam a warm, motherly smile that is positively creepy – I mean, the girl looks sixteen! How the hell does Sam get girls twelve years younger than he is to want to mother him?

"Tha'll want to go t'bed," She tells the kid. "Tha shouldn't be about so late. It'll do thee good to sleep." She turns to me. "Tha won't look so sour, neither," she adds. Then, laughing at my expression, she pulls the door shut behind her.

Bloody English country houses with their bloody echoing corridors and their bloody cheerful chambermaids.

"The Secret Garden?" I hiss at Sam as the girl flounces off down the corridor.

"Dean –"

"Are you out of your mind? You thought the way out was to jump into a wimpy children's story?"

"It was the only –"

"And anyway, was it written before The Hound of the Baskervilles? How did you know it would work?"

"I don't know exactly when it was written, but the edition was a new one."

"You saw it from like eight feet away."

"It was the same edition you read to me!" I stare. Sam blushes and says, "Look, it's stupid, but I thought… You read it to me, you know? It's one of the things I remember from that summer in New Mexico – it was the only good thing about that summer in New Mexico. I thought maybe something like that – maybe it would be our ticket out."

I obviously can't yell at the kid after that – and he knows it, the little fraud – so I just shrug. "Fine. So now we figure out where we are and how to get to the library. Or is it going to be something other than a library this time, too?"

"I don't –"

Sam stops short.

I heard it, too. Someone's crying – and I don't mean those creepy, breathy little moans ghosts make, but really crying.

It sounds like a kid.

Yay. The only thing that comes anywhere near Sammy in the list of Things That Dean Winchester Can't Say No To is bawling children, and clearly this universe knows that.

This settles it. No more British writers. They clearly hate us. In fact, I bet we had problems with Circe only because we used some British dude's translation of the Odyssey. If we'd jumped straight into the Greek version we'd probably have gotten out without almost being turned into pigs. Of course, Hermes would probably have talked gibberish at us, but you can't have everything… Anyway, I'm sure Sam would have worked it out.

Next time the awesome Dean Winchester will be picking the book, and it's not going to be by anyone from England. The last thing I want is to end up in Hogwarts and be eaten by a three-headed dog.

Meanwhile, Sam's already following the sound to its source. He leads us through the twisting labyrinth of passages with surprising speed – Sam's a good tracker, but nobody is that good. I have a strong suspicion that he's not following the sound at all. He probably remembers the exact location from the book, the big geek.

The Nerd of the Year stops at a heavy oak door. There's a glimmer of light shining from underneath it. We can hear someone crying on the other side. It's definitely a kid; from the sound of it, no older than twelve.

Sam looks at me. I look at him. We both know this is a bad idea. This is a book and it has a happy ending. We shouldn't be interfering with people here. It's all going to work out for them anyway. We should be looking for the library, looking for a book, and finding our way back to normal. And anyway, it's not like we're abandoning the wailing kid. Mary Lennox must be on her way already. She'll be here in a few minutes.

But…

Left to myself I'd definitely be doing the sensible thing, but my baby brother, in addition to being Nerd of the Year, is also Pushover of the Year. And I, unfortunately, am Pushover of the Century when he makes those big eyes (it must be some sort of voodoo; no way he could overcome my iron will otherwise) and says, "Dean."

It has nothing to do with me wanting to help the kid. Sam's the idiot, not me.

I open the door.

The room on the other side is big – not quite as big as the rooms in Elf-land, which were huge enough to hold entire apartment blocks, but bigger than rooms usually are in buildings that aren't palaces or old manor houses. The furniture is old and smells a little ratty. In one corner is a huge four-poster bed hung with white drapes that look like they're about to start moaning and rattling chains any second. In the bed is a boy.

Dean Winchester, standing in the creepiest room of an old-school haunted house (that isn't haunted) in order to have a chick-flick moment with a crying boy (who isn't Sammy). The things I do for my brother…

"Who are you?" the boy asks, his voice a horrified whisper. "Are… are you ghosts?"

And how is that for irony?

"We're not ghosts. We're here to help you," Sam says gently.

"Who are you?"

"My name is Sam." Sam says. "This is my brother Dean."

"What are you doing here?"

"We were looking for the library," Sam says. "We lost our way. Are you all right?"

He's making huge, sympathetic eyes that say I'm here and I'm listening. It doesn't work very well on boys, even boys who can out-puppy-dog Sam at his emo best. They usually just shake their heads and wonder how Sam didn't get the eyes and the emo-ness beaten out of him in elementary school. (Yeah, I know. If the eyes don't work on boys, how the hell do they work on me? That's what you're asking, right? Well… Hard to explain. Let's just say that if the boys knew Sam for more than a day, the eyes would work on them, too.)

I lay a hand on Sam's shoulder. He gets the message and backs off.

"I'm Dean," I tell the boy. "You're Colin, right?" I wait just long enough for him to nod. "Sorry to butt in on you like this –"

"Butt in?" the boy asks. I just manage not to roll my eyes. Of course some kid in England two hundred years ago would be puzzled by American slang.

"You know, invade your personal space in the middle of the night," I explain. Not sure they had personal space then, either, but at least that phrase is self-explanatory. "Sam's my little brother – have you got any little brothers?"

"No," Colin says, and I nod, thankful he hasn't started screaming.

"Dude, you have no idea how lucky you are. Little brothers are a pain. Look at Sam. He decided he needed to read Paradise Lost in the middle of the night, and of course I couldn't let him wander around this place alone. He'd've gotten completely lost." Sam gives me a tight smile that says there's going to be payback for this later.

Well, bring it on, bitch. Sam's the one who picked a book that led to me walking around another freaking English country house in the middle of the freaking night in a freaking nightdress.

Fortunately, before Sam can start making a bitchface – because I definitely don't want to subject the boy to one of Sam's bitchfaces – the door opens.

It's a girl. My first thought is freaking hell it's another little-girl ghost, but then I realize that's stupid because there weren't ghosts in the book, and I'm pretty sure that the person who came up with the plot of The Secret Garden wouldn't have believed in them unless she'd actually ended up being haunted by one.

"Miss Lennox," Sam says. This one I do let him handle, because Sam's always better with little girls. I expect they recognize him as one of their own.

"Is she a ghost?" Colin asks. He sounds scared, and I don't blame him: the girl's pale, still just a little too unhealthily skinny for the English countryside – at least from what I've seen – and her eyes are like saucers.

Great going, British writers. Dump me from a fictional world full of horrible demon dogs that want to eat my brother into a fictional world full of people who make the eyes for no bloody time I am definitely picking the book.

"No, I am not." little Miss Lennox answers. "Are you one?"

Colin just stares at her, eyes getting wider and wider. I'm starting to get a bit impatient, because even Sam was never this bad, when the kid finally opens his mouth. "No," he mumbles. "I am Colin."

He says it as though he's saying, "I am the Pope," and I'm not surprised when the girl's next question is, "Who is Colin?"

"I am Colin Craven."

Huh. Doesn't seem to be a lot more helpful than, "I am Colin," but the girl looks like she gets it.

"Who are you?" Colin Craven asks.

"I am Mary Lennox. Mr Craven is my uncle." Oh, of course. Craven. The grouchy dude who owned the house.

"Mr Craven is my father," Colin says, and touching as this moment of cousinly bonding is, time's wasting and Sam and I need to get out of here.

"Listen, kids," I say, "could one of you tell us where the library is before you have the family reunion?"

Colin lies back and gapes up at me with an expression of sickly surprise – probably astonished at being asked to actually do something useful to humanity – and Mary just looks like she wants to smack me but doesn't dare because I'm three times as big as she is and I'm backed up by a guy who's four times as big as she is.

Yeah, I'd forgotten how annoying those kids were in the beginning of the book.

"Please," Sam says gently. "I know you have a lot to talk about. If you'll just tell us, we'll leave."

Because no human being, not even one as determined to be cranky as Mary Lennox, can resist my little brother, it isn't long before we're on our way to the library, armed with an appallingly bad map that she drew for Sam on the back of a note from the housekeeper.

"Sam," I can't help saying, "what the hell are we doing?"

"Going to the library, Dean."

"Yeah, but why? We've been doing this for – what is it now? Hours? Days? Freaking weeks? We go to a library and we find a book and we go into another crazy loop."

"There's going to be a way out," Sam says quietly.

Something about his voice makes me stop and stare at him. He has that look, that look that says I'm going to do something stupid and possibly suicidal because for some warped reason that makes no sense except in my own stupid head, I think it will be good for Dean.

I realize that, despite the way he leaned into me for support on the walk from the marsh to Stapleton's cottage, he didn't tell me what his plan was to deal with the hellhound. He must have had something in mind; Sam's not dumb, and I can't believe he went up against the thing armed with, as far as I can tell, freaking nothing.

He looks like he's got a plan now.

This is all adding up in my head, and the result is nothing good. I have a strong feeling that this is one of Sam's I-want-to-make-sure-Dean-can't-sleep-for-a-week plans.

"Sam," I say warningly.

"What? I'm just saying. There's always a way out."

And with that reassuring (not!) and ultimately random pronouncement, Sam pushes open the door to the library.

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