When you've been hunting as long as Sam and Dean have, settings start to fall into certain common categories after a while. You've got your rural backroads. Seedy warehouse districts. Abandoned barns. Mansions, both ill- and well-maintained. Cemeteries that fall into the same subcategories. Office buildings. Forests.
Of all the places to work a case, that last one is Dean's very least favorite of all. He cringes every time he reads about tents ripped open at campgrounds, or hikers gone missing. It's not like he hates nature or plants or anything - he started a container garden on the bunker's roof, for Christ's sake. It's just trails do his knees no favors at all, every bug on the planet with a sucker or a stinger thinks he's the best damn thing since sliced bread, and fallen branches and snakes look way too similar for him to ever relax under the trees. Add in the two facts that forests are as good a home for bears and mountain lions as they are wendigos and werewolves, and you can't prepare for one without making yourself real appealing to the other, and Dean could die happy if he never saw another trailhead again.
Sam feels the same way, even if he'd never admit it even under torture. He has grim memories of being excited as a middle schooler for what his father called a "camping trip," only to miss a week of school trekking through the Oregon wilderness during one of the wettest springs on record, hand-me-down sneakers both woefully inadequate and flooded, and numb hands frozen into claws around the grip of a pistol. Oh, yeah: can't forget that he never got too cold to be bone-shakingly scared for his life the entire damn time. No matter how much he loves the burn in his calves, or how easy it is for him to ignore the mugginess of Southern woods or the chill of Northern ones, or how smug he gets over his freedom from bug bites, nothing can ever really erase that.
In other words, in the Great Winchester Consensus of Things, forest hunts suck. This one they're on right now is no exception. Except that it sucks even more than all of the others combined, because at least on those, even with the aching feet and the loud bitching and the increased threat of ambush by something that knew the terrain a lot better than them, they could remember what they were hunting.
They've been walking the argument in circles for hours as they swipe Spanish moss out of the way and step carefully over cypress roots. Sam thinks the memory failure is supernatural in origin, most likely to do with the reason they're here; they're in Louisiana, so he's hearing hoofbeats and thinking hoodoo. Dean agrees. But Sam is being an uppity little prick about the magic and Dean's toes are numb and his mosquito bites have gnat bites, so he keeps saying he thinks it's because they've been out here for god-fucking-damn ever and they're both tired and they didn't do enough boning up on the case before they headed out.
He can't speak to the research aspect. Neither of them can, with only the cloudiest of memories to hold onto. Finding something, coming out. But they're definitely tired, and they've definitely been out here for a long time. They started at dawn, and now it's dark again. Bugs swarm gauzy in the beams of their flashlights, and their backpacks are much lighter with the food they packed almost entirely gone. They didn't bring enough water. The muddy, filthy stuff that wells squelching in every footprint is more appealing by the second.
They should have turned back hours ago. Sam thinks they didn't because they're both just too stubborn. Dean thinks whatever's making them forget won't let them.
"Well, look, we got silver knives in the packs, right?" Dean says, because they are once again retreading the ground of trying to reverse-engineer the identity of their quarry. "Gotta be a shifter."
"You use silver in a lot of rituals to neutralize a witch," Sam says primly. "And a shifter wouldn't fry our brains like this."
"Okay…" Dean grinds his way through the word. "But there's also - "
Then he suddenly stops. Stops talking, stops walking. It's not because he can't see where he's going. Quite the opposite, in fact. Everything is bright, lit up, he can see every petal on the orchids growing around the trees. He keeps waiting for it to fade, like a camera flash. To leave him blind. But it doesn't. It's like they've suddenly crossed a physical boundary between midnight and high noon.
Dean even glances behind him, like there might be a wall of darkness butting up against his back. Nope, just more trees he can see perfectly fine. He switches off his flashlight.
Sam, who thank god has traveled with him to whatever this anomaly is, looks shell-shocked standing next to him.
"Well, hey, look on the bright side," Dean tells Sam, forcedly upbeat. "At least we found something, right?"
Sam doesn't answer, because they both have a very strong feeling it's the other way around.
They stand there a second. Then they start walking forward, because there's nothing else they can do.
The trees thin out, the light gets brighter. The sky overhead's a brilliant pale blue, no clouds in sight. They come upon a clearing, filled with waist-high grass, a bleached gold in death. It's thick, runs down to a depression smack-dab in the center of the space, and hangs over into water demon-black. There's a tree rising out of the middle of the pond, and it's dead, too. Has no bark on it, bald wood an unnatural ivory. It's not a cypress. Or a palmetto or a magnolia or any of the other trees that usually grow around here. Its branches come to razored points.
There's a corpse impaled on them.
It's as pale as the tree, looks almost mummified with its white skin shrunken to its bones. There's no head, and it's in a Passion pose that's just about the least holy thing Sam or Dean could imagine, arms draped out over the branches that pierce them and legs dangling below with one foot pressed demurely atop the other. A branch spears it through the chest, hoisting it aloft.
They've seen a whole lot of bodies, but it wouldn't take a medical student to figure out something's not right about this one. Outside of the decapitated state and the fact it's hanging off a tree in the middle of a swampy forest, even. For one, it's got too many ribs.
"Well." The word feels like it's peeling Dean's throat open. "Don't think I've ever seen any hoodoo like that before."
"That's 'cause it's not." Sam's voice is only a rasp. "It's not any kinda witchcraft."
He sounds so sure about that Dean can't challenge him on it, no matter how many fucked-up things he's seen witches do over the years. Besides: there's something in him too, deeper than bones, that feels rock-steady positive Sam's right.
"I don't know what it is," Sam adds, and though it's out of character for him not to be curious, he feels no real need to rectify that situation.
Neither of them says anything for a while. Neither of them is quite sure how long they stand there, on the edge of the clearing, staring at the thing in the middle of it. Dean is sure that if they were to set boots in the grass, the ground would be soft, less like mud than the buttery crumble of rotting meat. Sam is thinking about bending down over the black water on hands and knees, pressing lips to it and sucking in - just a sip, or a mouthful, just enough to get them back to the nearest trail.
It's been so very, very long since either of them had anything to drink. Black water weeps from unseen pores on the tree's trunk, a drop every tenth heartbeat or so.
"Maybe this is what we were looking for," Sam suggests eventually.
Dean has to agree. It does look like the kind of thing that should burn, even though he can't even begin to imagine the trail of research and witness statements that would have led them to...whatever the undead fuck this is.
Still, neither of them move, because they don't know what to do next.
When something finally changes, it's impossible to know how long it's been. The light has not dimmed or brightened, but there's still the sensation of hours having passed.
Ironically, despite the point he makes of blowing holes in both eardrums with gunshots and rock music every time his body is restored, it's Dean who notices it first. The sound. He thinks it's just more bugs at first, which is when he finally realizes that he hasn't heard or seen a single bug since they very first stepped into the light. The chorus of crickets and frogs and night birds has fully stopped, and it finally hits him like a piano dropped from three floors up, just how weird that is. Just how weird it is that he didn't pick up on it right away.
The sound is a hum, like a tuning fork struck and vibrating. It's flat and pitchless, nothing at all musical about it. It takes too long to figure out where it's coming from, as it grows steadily louder. Like the water in a pot heating up by tenths of degrees around the frog sitting in it.
It's Sam who sees it. The very ends of the tree's branches are blurred with motion, noise drifting across the clearing. He swallows.
The corpse should be vibrating, too. After all, the skin of its chest is inches from the tip of the branch piercing it. But it remains perfectly, mortifyingly still. Until suddenly it doesn't.
Sam grabs Dean's arm, sucking in a panicked, burning breath. He doesn't have to say anything, because Dean's seen it, too. They back slowly away, in near-perfect unison, from the clearing. The black water. The humming tree and the twitching corpse. Even when they are deep enough in the woods that they can no longer see it, they don't turn their backs on it until it's dark again. It drops like a curtain, like the light did. If the humming's still there, now it's drowned out by the noises of the natural forest.
Around dawn, they make it to a waterway, get picked up by a pair of fishermen who seem to take great delight in chewing them out for heading into unfamiliar woods with inadequate supplies.
"You boys stupid or something?" demands one. "Don't you know what's out there?"
Sam's head jerks up, eyes wide.
"Gators! Pumas, even. And the snakes we got here, Jeeeesus. You step on a water moccasin, that's it."
They both relax, and say nothing as they head back to civilization.
They never do manage to remember what the original hunt was. Or how many fingers and toes the body had.
You see a lot of unfortunate things in this business. You either learn to forget, or you go crazy. So they do the former, gladly. Until Dean climbs up to the roof of the bunker to check on his tomatoes and finds five small branches broken through the rich black soil he mixed himself. Like the skeletal fingers of a dead hand.
He burns everything. It makes something small and new and fragile inside him shrivel, watching blossoms blacken and ripening fruit burst. But it's better than the alternative.
The vegetables he promised Sam by fall never come. Having seen and then held him when he came down sooty and hollow from the roof, Sam doesn't ask why.