Chapter 30

Wednesday, May 1st, 2002

Miriam led Sam through the beaded curtain, but no farther than a step. Her outstretched hand, holding open the curtain, remained a barrier. Sam wasn't sure how he knew but he felt like Miriam had tensed.

"Be gone from this place. Leave." She projected into the room. Sam peered around the curtain.

He saw that this extra room was already occupied, by a young girl with French braided hair who was no taller than the chair she sat in. She turned at his glance. Looked at him over her shoulder. Sam tried to gasp through the block in his throat.

"I said - Be. Gone."

As the word left Miriam's mouth she slammed the butt of her cane into the ground, Sam covering his eyes instinctually. The sound was the crack of a whip, unlike any Sam would have thought to hear come from the rugs that decorated the tent, and the accompanying light was as bright as a firecracker. But both were gone in an instant. When Sam uncovered his eyes the room sat empty.

"That was - "

"Don't doddle, Samuel, they're already with us." She walked through the curtain, into the room. Sam did not.

"She - "

"Will be back if you do not put this to rest. Come in the room."

Sam swallowed put on foot in front of the other. The light in the room was, unsurprisingly, purple, coming from another hidden source but that flickered still like fire. The metallic threads of Miriam's scarves glittered and shone in strange colors while she moved. She was calling out instructions all the while, perhaps hoping to plant some kind of understanding in Sam. He stood in the middle of the room like a fish out of water as Miriam readied herself, moving supplies around the table, setting some that hadn't been out yet. Sam could never in his life say what all these materials were that Ivan had prepared; Miriam had the truth of it, he understood nothing about witchcraft. But, while Sam stood still, he took stock of what he saw. Glass jars stopped with corks and covered in wax, filled with things that seemed plant-like and some that weren't. He spied one jar in which was an object suspiciously shaped like a tiny jawbone, and he stiffened, swallowed. Familiar smoke drifted through the room from a corner Sam couldn't find and carried the same sickly sweet aroma as the incense from before. And all the while, the wind continued to blow, the monster continued to roar, pushing at the hollows in the canvas walls with a strength that forced Sam to keep looking back at it for tears.

"Sam," Miriam broke off her shuffling to point at him. "It's time to sit."

But he couldn't. Not where the girl had been. A tremor was in his knees, the muscles in his legs quivering while he still tried to stand tall. He obsessively cracked the knuckles on one hand. Yet he couldn't take the seat.

"Samuel." At his full name he snapped to attention. It was the name John called him when it was time to be serious. It's always time to be serious. "In a matter of minutes the spirits will swallow us whole. It is time."

Sam eyed the table again. He had carried the charm from the other room, once he'd found it beneath the contents of the shelves that had fallen in the blast. He squeezed the charm where he held it, in his pocket. Why wouldn't this thing just…disappear, go back to Dean so he wouldn't have to worry about it?

He swallowed again, despite himself. The tendrils of wind that came through the canvas walls was icy as the winter, and mean. He pulled his clenched fist from his sweater pocket, and looked at the velvet fabric. Suddenly, he didn't want to let it go, and could only stare.

"Samuel." She made a few quick snaps with her fingers to steal back his attention. "We cannot wait a second longer. We will have more guests the longer we spend on this game." The business was back in her voice. "Take your seat and put this business to rest."

Sam's breath came to a halt behind the choke in his throat. He opened his mouth and forced the air in. He hadn't noticed when it started, but his hand, which before had been a clenched stone, was trembling as he held out the charm. The color of the fabric was an attack on his eyes even in the smoky light.

"The things you feel are fair and warranted, Sam, but someday, this pain will be useful to you. You must make your decision."

Sam nodded his head, and reached his shaking hand towards the back of his chair to pull it out.

—

The limping pair had wound their way through the barren stalls and rides, leaving behind them a trail of blood from Ivan's leg, like bread crumbs. Dean couldn't shake the witch. It hadn't seemed to matter how quickly he pulled Ivan along; each glance over his shoulder showed the witch just turning the corner, or a handful of paces in their wake. He wasn't gaining, exactly, which was the good news, but neither was he slowing. It was Ivan who was slowing, the more blood he lost. The directions to his mother's tent had began coming slower and slower. It had been Dean's best to get them as far as a carousel. But now Ivan wouldn't answer any of Dean's questions, or use his good leg for anything other than dragging it behind them, leaving Dean alone to guess what to do here.

The carousel was as dead as any of the other rides, the animals' plastic, black eyes staring out like caught fish. Dean looked behind; for the moment, the witch had disappeared behind the last turn. That just meant he was on his way. With as much care as he could manage, Dean hauled Ivan onto the carousel, towards the back, where he could hide behind…something, though how long could he hide them before Ivan bled out, or they were found out?

Dean crouched behind the central pillar of the carousel rather than an animal, as it was the widest thing here to hide the large man behind, and tried his best to ease Ivan off his shoulder. Yet, Dean was reaching his highest limit. Ivan's shoulders hit the ride with a strong thud, his head rolling to the front. With soft taps to his cheek Dean tried to rustle Ivan awake.

"Ivan," he whispered, though the rain did a fine job of drowning out most of his volume. "Ivan," Dean tried, louder. He waited. No use. All he did was force Ivan's head to sway like a pendulum. He wasn't cradling his arm anymore, either, and what had earlier been a frightening stream of blood running from his shoulder had nearly died out, the rain ensuring it never dried. Without the time to get close to the wound on his leg there was no telling what was rain and what blood. Dead growled in his anger and pounded the side of his fist against the nearest animal, a bear with a necklace of flowers. It shook on its base but the sound was as hollow as the satisfaction he got from it. The Ferris wheel stood above the other rides at the far side of the festival. In the raging wind Dean could see it swaying, like a tree at a river's edge.

"Winchester!"

Instinctively, Dean lowered, peered around Ivan and the fake animals. The sagged figure of the witch stood in the small clearing where Dean had moments ago, no doubt where the waiting carousel riders would gather for their turns. He spun in place with his arms limp at his sides. Dean knew not to underestimate the witch, however he looked, but this wasn't all that kept Dean behind cover - the anger was rolling off the witch like ripples in the water, heat coming off the asphalt during a summer drive. Dean thought that if he reached out a hand it would coat his skin like a tar. He got even lower in his crouch.

The witch looked this way and that, spinning manically in place at the center of the clearing, the slight sounds of his growl reaching Dean through the storm. With each turn he made, the energy in the air shifted as if he pushed it around with nothing but his willpower, his lame arms useless around him, the rain falling off his fingers in scarlet drops. It was within this pool of power where, like steadfast rocks in a river, flashes of ghostly figures would appear, then disappear just as quickly. With each pass the witch made of the area, with each shift of his anger which seemed to follow his gaze, specters stood still as stone, their gray skin withstanding the freezing rain, their clothing as dead and lifeless in the wind as they were. Here for a moment; flickering away like television static. The witch screamed; his anger flashed through the air like a bomb; Dean choked on the thickness of it. The witch might not have known where to look, and neither did he seem to see these ghosts, but they knew where to point their stare. And each one appeared closer and closer to the carousel. Within the few breaths that had passed, Dean and the witch stood among a new sea, made of these visitors. And they were all looking at Dean.

A hand grasped Dean's shirt. The next instant he was weightless, flying backwards like no more than a discarded wad of paper. The shock didn't allow him to prepare - he landed upside down in the gravel, rolled off of his neck to settle on his back, staring at the sky. The black hulking cloud above was more skull-shaped than ever, with the hollows of its eyes veined with lighting and the mouth open in its grimace. Dean was up in a flash. The myriad of ghosts had somehow dispersed, but there was one set of eyes that had finally found their mark. The witch smiled and his eyes flashed red, saying, "There!" And the witch ran, sending gravel behind him with each step.

Dean sprinted in the other direction, knowing not the way or the destination. He didn't believe the witch would stop to bother with Ivan; during the time of their chase, the witch's screams hadn't for the him, but for Dean himself. Ivan seeming no more important than a backpack or lunchbox. Dean promised to go back for him the moment this son of a bitch was dealt with - and buried in the ground, so he wouldn't come back again.

Dean sprinted around the corner of an empty booth whose stuffed prizes had been blown away, the rest swaying on their hooks. In his path the apparition of a headless body flashed over and again like a broken street light. Dean skidded to a halt, changed his course. On fast feet he overtook one more booth, then another. He heard the deep scream of the witch as if it were there on his shoulder, but there was nothing, and it was as if the witch's running footsteps echoed his own and knew that once again he would always be too close. Dean faltered a step, but caught himself on the countertop of the nearest booth. Deep in his body Dean could feel his exhaustion like a black hole, the last scraps of his resolve and energy falling inside it helplessly. How long had he been running? How much longer would he have to run? What could he do against any of this when it felt as though the world were against him, too?

A horrified scream of a young girl cut through his thoughts and the wind but passed like a speeding car at the same time Dean saw a lumped humanoid shape ahead of him in the gravel, clawing towards him without any legs, just to see it fade away like a vision. Behind that was the laughter of a villain from some phantom, then words spoken that he could hear but didn't understand, swept away like a dust on the wind. The dark, dead figures of those no longer on this plane were a constant in the corners of Dean's vision. This place was chaos; it was a labyrinth built out of carnival games and it felt like his pursuer had every map to the place.

He ran through a small court of food stalls that he'd already searched for Sam, his lungs alight with fire. Around another corner, and he came face to face with the scared, half-shorn face of a woman in a white nightgown. She brought a dead hand to Dean's throat and snatched him out of the air. Like a rag she tossed him to the side where he collided with trashcan, rolling around in the violent wind. He had no air, but rose anyway. These ghosts - being mad with them made no sense, even if he had the time to spare for that. There was no reasoning with them, only with the one who had the power over them, and Dean believed that wouldn't happen till this witch was dead and in the ground. Dean tried to run again, but a stitch in his lungs and a suddenly painful leg slowed him considerably, eyeing the ghost of the woman at the side who had plucked him like a feather. No more than a few paces, though, and Dean was taken by an army of hands and pressed to the ground.

He rolled under the intense weight but could only come to his back, meeting the sordid faces that held him. A pair of men who were as transparent as a piece of paper held up to the sun, identical in face and the twist at their necks. Their grins were devilish, lips cracked. One held Dean to the ground at the shoulders while the other raised a rock in the air. And Dean, his eyes filling with rain water and his spirit screaming for rest, didn't believe he had it in him to run any longer, and felt his head fall back to lay in the gravel.

The cloud above seemed to open its maw wider, as if it had come onto some triumph in that moment. Dean decided then that he would keep his eyes open, too, when the ghost killed him. And so was why, when the hand holding the rock never swung down, and the air around him seemed to spark like the ground had been struck, and the black skull above became a jack-o-lantern, lit from the inside, Dean witnessed it all. The howl that filled his head had been unlike any he'd heard up to that point. It wasn't the scream of an animal meeting in its dying; it wasn't one made out of anger; it wasn't one of a bereaved mother holding her dead child. In hindsight, Dean would be able only to liken it to a flame being snuffed, alive one moment and gone the next, not burning itself to the end of a wick but a flame that had been extinguished before it was ready like water thrown on the coals of a fire. A tear through the world of a complete and utter desolation.

It was such an assault on his senses that Dean wondered if he was really watching his own life slip away, if this was what dying was like in actuality. But he remembered that the rock had never fallen across his face, and that his shoulders were suddenly free. He gasped, feeding his lungs some of the air they craved. Solace fell on him like a brick and tears came to his eyes. Maybe once this was over he would start appreciating his lungs more.

On a sore body Dean rolled over, caught himself on his elbow and began to rise again, taking in his surroundings to see that - yes, he was finally alone. The hanged twins that had caught him, the woman that had tossed him, rotting even as she'd stood there, the passersby who'd screamed and laughed all around him. All a figment of memory. The witch - what had happened? Had he been stopped somehow? Dean didn't believe he would be so lucky, though he wished it so fiercely, maybe he could make it real.

The witch came down Dean's path and found himself standing before a fallen man struggling to put himself back on his feet. The witch slowed and walked over with a haughty posture across his limp shoulders.

"How does it feel to be on the ground for once, Winchester?" His voice sounded much the same as it had on their first, and even second, meeting, but the depth that was accompanying it now sounded like there was another voice, richer, larger, on the undercurrents of his words. As he strode closer to Dean, who finally pushed himself up to a kneeling position, Dean considered the glow in his eyes and the mist of power that still surrounded him. So the ghosts hadn't been his doing.

A flash of a memory - John punching him outside their apartment. "I've been…" Dean trailed, catching his breath and running the back of his hand over his brow. "On the ground…before."

The witch tsked. "You laugh at us, kill us, but it sounds like you could use a little magic right now." As though to punctuate it the red in his eyes pulsed, gasoline added to the fire. He took another brooding step closer. This was close enough for Dean. He tried to push up off the ground once again but his legs had died, turned to exhausted muscle and bone in the short time he'd already been down. He came down on his forearms. The world was trembling, and the rain didn't help him find his center, if he had one left anymore.

He heard the fast few sounds of more running footfalls, the witch saying, "That's far enough," and he was pinned again to the ground like he'd been staked there. The witch pulled him around to his back where Dean was once again looking at the clouds.

The electricity within the cloud had flickered and died alongside the scream, Dean supposed. At its blackest edges, the clouds had began smudging, dissolving, which was…curious. Shifting like a thousand birds suddenly taking flight, the desert sands carried around by the wind. No time had passed at all, but some power had drained out the cloud in those few seconds, he thought. To call it a skull wouldn't have been right any longer; it was ashes in the breeze, smoke. He also saw the Ferris wheel above him. He was collapsed at its base. From a distant part in his mind he recognized how far he'd run from the carousel, and Ivan, who he hoped was still alive. The large Ferris wheel rocked in the wind; Dean wondered if it would fall over them, killing the both of them before the witch ever got the chance. He hoped it would, then hoped that Sam wouldn't be the one who found his body. The last thing he'd said to Sam, We aren't safe here.

"Look at me," the witch said, straddling him across the waist, Dean's arms held under his knees at the elbow. The witch's own arms were shorn to ribbons, Dean could see, shredded by the explosion of glass in the mirror house, the pieces of glass which still clung to his flesh. Dean did.

A wave of the witch's anger hit him like a blast from a furnace, fighting with the freezing pellets of the rain. "This is for my friends." A shadow began encroaching on them from the witch's back.

Dean didn't leave his eyes open this time, ready for his rest, ready for whatever the witch would do. It would be fast, Dean knew. A noise like a scythe swinging through the air joined the wind and the rain but Dean felt none of the pain he had expected. Instead he was floating in a new blackness, meeting the exhaustion halfway he supposed, carried away on it like a leaf on the current of a stream. It was a bliss he hadn't anticipated. He slipped away from the weight of the witch's body, as he did from the ache in his bones, piece by piece.

Through the thickness of the black, a voice called him, "Dean."

His eyes snapped open. The weight of his body was back, the drenched clothing on his skin, the pains in his core. And too was the rain and the wind, the Ferris wheel swaying though not as intensely as it had, but the skull - or rather, the place that the skull had been - was nearly erased. And there, cupping his face with cold, hard fingers, was Sam, wet snakes of hair falling around his worried face as he tried to catch Dean's eye.

"Oh," Dean breathed, finding a layer of relief he had never felt before, deeper and more rich than any he'd just come back from. "Good. You're…good." His head fell to the side and out of Sam's hands. There the witch laid in one more piece than he had been before. The cherry red pair of eyes in his severed head were dead now. Left behind were charred pits. Dean exhaled the breath he'd been saving for this moment, savoring the sigh. "Fucking finally."

Two voices became one. "Are you alright?"

Dean laughed to himself, grabbing Sam's outreaching hand. "I got hit by a train," he said. Sam pulled him up to his feet. A pain flashed through Dean's right leg and he gasped, already falling back down. But Sam caught him under the arms and bared his weight. He tossed one of Dean's arms over his shoulders and Dean gave a weak smile, focusing on the feel of Sam at his side. "Where the fuck…were you?" Dean swung a lazy hand to Sam's cheek but only succeeded in a tap. "Been looking everywhere."

"We - " Sam broke off, grunted as he adjusted his grip on Dean. "We need to get out of the rain."

"Couldn't agree more. There's someone else out here first, though. They're hurt."

"We'll find him."

Sam led Dean out of the small pavilion, leaving the body of the witch behind them, and they hobbled through the stalls. Even as they took their slow steps, the wind was calming down, the rain no longer flying as daggers against them but waves of a downpour on their heads. This new silence, their slow pace - Dean felt a peace he hadn't since Indianapolis, at Jameson's when the -

His head snapped to attention, turning to Sam. "The charm."

Sam rolled his jaw but didn't return the gaze. "Forget it, it's done. We'll talk when we're alone."

"When we're…" Dean looked ahead.

At the end of a row of skeletal booths and games was a tent that looked as though it hadn't been in the rain and wind all this time. The stakes tethering it to the ground where still in tact, the tight pull of the ropes wobbling in the wind though they were, and the sandwich board sign by the front door still stood, sharing the sale of future tellings for the low cost of five dollars. None of this was as surprising to Dean as the shape of another real life person standing in the mouth of the tent, a woman shorter than him what had to have been two feet. She wore the look of a wizened crone right on her face, Dean thought, as she stood under an umbrella. He glanced at Sam, who didn't seemed shocked at all to see her.

It was the old woman who called out first as Sam brought them within earshot of her. "My son, where have you left him?"

Dean knew that was a question for him. He called, "At the carousel. But he's not good." This is his mother, Dean thought, this dark-skinned woman who was swathed in an entire department store's reserve of scarves. He didn't question how the towering figure of a man who'd saved his life before could have come from her, but maybe he hadn't.

The woman moved aside as they approached. "Go inside out of the rain, I'll get my son."

"Are you sure?" Sam stopped them and Dean came up short at the tone Sam's offer. There was a familiarity there, a sense of trust he had in the old woman. Dean eyed both their faces in the moment. Sam was breathing harder from the exertion, and though Dean wanted to sprint to the carousel himself right then and carry Ivan inside with them, he didn't know if he had the energy in him to make even the few steps inside.

The woman nodded affirmation and walked away into the rain. The last thing Dean saw before disappearing into the cover of the tent on Sam's shoulder was the woman's scarves, some trailing behind in the gravel and dirt like a train, yet they weren't becoming dirty.