Chapter Eleven
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"Truth is as subjective as reality." -Jose Chung, The X-Files
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"A month ago." She repeated, trying to calm down. "A month ago me and my little sister, Kim, were in Randy's. We grew up in this town, we've been going there all our lives. Nothing bad ever happened before."
You could never hear a supernatural story without at least a little angst, Sam thought sadly, especially if the supernatural occurrence was brought about by the most powerful human emotion there was; grief.
By the way Lyn's eyes were already welling up and focusing on something far away, Sam could tell that that's what this was.
"But something did happen?" Sam was forced to prompt when she didn't go on. He was sympathetic to human suffering, he really was. In fact, he couldn't think of anyone - except perhaps Dean - who was in a better position to be more sympathetic. What with all their personal loss and day to day dealings with heartache.
But right now the youngest Winchester felt like he was going a little bit insane - a hard feeling for him to come by since last year when he'd watch his girlfriend die the exact same way his mother had, days before it had actually happened - and he really needed that feeling to go away. Only a logical explanation could do that for him.
"Do you remember the man?" She asked weakly, obviously not wanting to explain anything more than she had to.
She wouldn't have to. Because Sam did remember. Whether he was recalling images from his vision or...something else; different memories, wasn't exactly clear to him. But he did remember the man. The madman with the gun who had shot...
"Yeah," Sam swallowed. "I remember."
Lyn nodded. "He came to our diner one night a month ago. It was the first day she'd been back here in a while. She'd been over seas in South America. Peace Corp."
"Nice." Sam couldn't help but honestly admire this girl he'd never met. It took a lot of guts and a true desire to help, to join an organization like that. He'd always put people like that on the side of the good guys.
"I know," And there was so much pride there. "She signed up the day she turned eighteen, she wanted to get away from here, I knew that. But hell, she found a damn good way to do it. She trained for three months in California, but they didn't call her until she was twenty. She served for two years. I hadn't seen her for two years the day I picked her up. The day after that - today - was the first full day we got together in two years. She was still on a messed up time schedule, you know? So we ended up eating late." There was that pause that Sam recognized so well. The one that was full of doom and all the things they fought so hard to protect people against.
The atmosphere of the hospital room shifted as he tried to smile sympathetically. It came out as a grimace, and it didn't really matter, because Sam doubted Lyn could seem him at all through her tears.
"What happened?" Sam whispered softly.
"That guy came in a shot her." Lyn got it out in one gasp, breathing hard and fighting back sobs once it was out. "There hadn't been an unnatural death in El Groton since Jim Paulman killed himself. And that was almost-"
"A hundred years ago." Sam interrupted, and something important occurred to him. He ignored it though, as Lyn started talking again. Now obviously wasn't the right time for that.
"Yeah." She sighed sadly, if she thought it was at all odd or suspicious that Sam knew that tidbit of information, she didn't comment on it. "And that guy just walked into town with that gun. Just to get money. I mean, what did he think, that small town diners don't use banks? That they'd just have a year's worth of profits piled up in the stockroom?"
Sam shook his head, indicting that he neither could decipher the thought process of the lunatic that had truly began all this insanity.
"Maybe he thought a town like this wouldn't have a good police force."
They usually don't. Sam noted to himself, but refrained from saying so out loud. The filter he had - and Dean lacked - that told him what was appropriate and what wasn't, kicking in and informing him that now wasn't the best time to bring that up.
"Either way..." her anger receded as pain flooded her voice once again. "...he killed Kimmy that night. He killed her. I watched her die. Do you have any idea what it's like to watch your sister die?"
"No," Sam whispered. Although, if it was anything like the mental movie he'd gotten of his brother dying, in his arms, time and time again, he'd much rather never find out.
"I couldn't just...let him get away with that. I couldn't let her die. I couldn't let her stay dead."
Ah-oh.
"What did you do?" Sam asked wearily, recalling that they'd dealt with something very similar to this not so long ago.
"I went to Calvin's Corner, the bookstore in town." She stopped and looked at his thoughtfully. "Did you ever go there?"
Sam recalled a large shop with floor to ceiling shelves, a misleading front display and a hidden back room. He closed his eyes and saw ancient texts - translations that he'd told Dean he'd needed, a book on demons that Dean had found. A law book that had prompted a fight...maybe. And a store owner that Dean believed had a homosexual crush on him.
"I remember it now."
"What?" Lyn questioned. Sam figured, to her, it was probably a pretty ambiguous answer for a question that was straight forward. But hell, she started it. All this ambiguous crap.
"I remember it now." He repeated. "The more you tell me, the more I remember."
"I thought you already did?" She seemed confused, and eager to get away from the subject of her little sister for the moment. Sam couldn't blame her for wanting an emotional brake form that.
He was also rather glad to provide it. "I remember bits a pieces." He told her. Which sounded way less weird than, 'I had a vision of bits and pieces of this messed up past that isn't really a past.'
Lyn was dealing with a lot right now - as was Sam - the last thing either of them needed to do was hear the long, drawn out explanation of his psychic abilities.
"The more you say, the more real it seems. The less I feel like..."
"Like you're going nuts?" Lyn provided, and chuckled humorlessly when Sam gave her an agreeing look. "I felt like that too. When all this started. Hell, sometimes I still do feel like that. For a while there, I was beginning to think this was all some sort of bizarre, messed up hallucination. That I'd hit my head or something, and all this wasn't really happening, I was actually locked up in a mental institution somewhere."
"Then I showed up?" Sam guessed.
"Yeah." She nodded. "You and..." she looked at him oddly then, tilting her head.
"My brother." He answered unvoiced question. "Me and him... We actually kinda deal with this stuff a lot."
"What kind of stuff?" Lyn's brow crinkled suspiciously. Sam knew that look.
"Supernatural stuff." He said easily; way, way past the point of worrying about sounding like a lunatic or scaring her away or keeping hidden their family secret. "Sometimes witchcraft stuff. This isn't the first spell I've seen done meant to bring back the dead."
"Only that's not what it did," She flung up her hands helplessly. "I went to the bookstore and found a spell that would bring my sister back to life. It was written in Latin. I translated the damn thing myself. I did everything it said to do, and when I woke up the next morning, Kimmy was alive. At first I'd thought it'd worked. She didn't have any memory of what had happened and I was so grateful, that I didn't even notice at first...that neither did anyone else."
Sam listened carefully, face scrunched up in concentration.
"I mean, we were walking around town, and people were just acting like nothing had happened. Talking to Kim like she hadn't died the night before, and I didn't know what to do. Then I thought, well hey, this is great. I mean, I hadn't even thought about how I would explain it to everyone - to Kim herself - what I had done. If she would even remember. The book didn't say anything about what would happen after the spell was done, how it would affect the people directly involved or the person coming back.
After not too long, I just convinced myself that this was perfect. The perfect solution to something that was never supposed to happen. I was so happy." Lyn shook her head sadly. "We went to Randy's again that night. Because Kim wanted to, and I couldn't think of a legitimate excuse not to."
Sam could pretty much guess what had happened next. He was good at putting together puzzle pieces. He really didn't like the picture this was making.
"Then it happened again. I watched my sister die. Again." She placed a hand on her forehead for a moment angrily, tears and rage building up an almost palpable layer around her. "Then I woke up, and it was the same day. Then I woke up again, and again and ... It hasn't changed. I've been living this day for the last month."
"And nothing's changed?" Sam inquired gently.
"Oh, no." Lyn snorted sarcastically. "Things change. Sometimes I keep Kimmy away from the diner and she doesn't die. Sometimes we're there and she doesn't die. I killed that bastard a couple times, watched him get away most of the other. Heather got caught in the crossfire two or three times. Once I died." She took a deep breath and looked at Sam like she had at the beginning of this tale. "But every single day I wake up, and live again the same twenty-four hours. And no one's been able to leave town, and no one new has come through. Until you and your brother. Four days ago."
"Four days?" Sam exclaimed, completely bypassing her hopeful, hinting voice. He had memories. Odd memories that didn't exactly add up, but... "Four days?"
"Yeah." She nodded. "Twice your brother died. Once you did. And one time you guys just didn't show up at all. I think that mighta been right before I found you there one afternoon and yelled at you about not belonging here."
Sam raised her eyebrows at her.
She shrugged. "Hey, you freaked me out a little at first."
"We freaked you out?" Sam shook his head, not sure what exactly to think of all this yet. He settled, of course, on an old fallback; gather more information. "Hey, you don't happen to have a copy of that spell on you, do you?"
Before the words were even all the way out of his mouth, Lyn was shuffling through the scruffy messenger bag that had been hanging at her side when she'd come in and had been sitting at her feet since then.
She had it pulled out in no time. "I brought it when I decided to come tonight. I didn't know if you'd actually be able to help me, but I hoped..."
Sam nodded understandingly and took the crumpled, yellowed page, that had obviously been torn from a textbook, out of her hands and carefully unfolded it.
He skimmed it through. It was a whole page in tiny printed Latin, a few diagrams threw in for good measure. He thought at first that it looked pretty straight forward, and he couldn't think of why it hadn't worked like it was intended to work.
Which of course meant that he'd missed something.
So he read it again. That's when he realized that he couldn't actually read it. Any of it.
Shit.
"This isn't in Latin." He said slowly.
"But-"
"It's ancient Latin." He explained, still looking down at the paper and feeling oddly like he'd had this conversation before. "It's similar, but... If you translate an ancient form of a language with the regular translations, it'll seem like you're doing it right if you're not familiar with the language. My brother did that once. Almost killed both of us." One look in her wide, frightful eyes assured Sam that Lyn had defiantly taken Spanish in high school. "You have to have the right books to translate it."
"I didn't." She was shaking her head, so panicked she looked about ready to have a nervous breakdown. "I didn't know. I just...used what was there. And the internet. I pieced it together a little at a time."
"Here's a tip." Sam said wearily, lowering the paper and studying this desperate woman. "Googling spells to bring back the dead? Not such a good idea."
She let her head sink into her hands and snorted humorlessly at Sam's words. "I wasn't really thinking clearly."
"I understand that." Sam said sympathetically.
"So..." she looked up timidly when he said nothing more, her expression was doubtful; like she couldn't believe he wasn't yelling at her.
Part of Sam did want to yell. To scream and get angry and accuse this woman of being a friggin' moron and not thinking of the long-tern affects of her decision. He wanted to tell her that what's dead should stay dead - that that's the natural course the world took.
But his head still hurt, his back was getting stiff, he had a feeling that whatever pain meds he might be on were beginning to wear off, and... And they were talking about a goddamn time-loop for crap's sake. Yelling about bad decisions seemed completely irrelevant.
Plus, he'd never quite gotten himself to fully believe in that what's dead should stay dead rule. In some instances - Lyn's sister - yeah, dead pretty much should have stayed dead; then again, the same thing could be said for his brother. An outside influence had acted to keep him alive, and the affects had been devastating.
Much like this.
"Sam?" Lyn's inquiring tone broke through his thoughts.
"Yeah?" He grunted, making an honest effort to let go of his own grief.
"I asked if you could help me." She repeated the words that had been lost on the youngest Winchester. "Can you help me fix this?"
Sam shook his head and groaned internally. "Maybe," he admitted. "I have to tell my brother all this. Make him believe what's going on."
Lyn nodded, but then looked suddenly nervous, if not a little sheepish. Glancing at her wrist - her watch - she looked up and bit her lip. "Not gonna happen in the next three and a half minutes, is it?"
"Come again?"
"The day," Lyn let out a deep breath. "Rewinds every night at the exact same time. The time Kimmy died. Ya know, the first time." Sam stared. "Two-thirty-seven."
"In three minutes?" He asked. "I...I mean, what's gonna..?"
"Just like before. The day will start over wherever you started out originally."
"The motel." Sam said.
She shrugged. "Yeah, I guess."
"Will I, I mean..."
"I don't know." She said, sighing with an air of defeat.
Sam tried to think about it. The lost days that he could scarcely recall, the broken fragments that his vision had showed him. As far as he could tell, the day didn't go beyond Dean's death. Or his own.
Of course, that wouldn't explain away the day they hadn't gone to the diner. Yet his memories - or whatever these were - didn't even touch a pocket of time that might be considered...rewinding, or whatever they wanted to call it.
He thought about it some more, considered it from all angles, logical and not; and that was the last thing he could remember doing.
Thinking.
TBC...