Funny thing is John doesn't hate hospitals. You'd think he might, but he doesn't.
Places hold power over people, he can respect that, understand it. Graveyards, churches, childhood homes. No shame in letting them hold power either, and all that's only gotten more true for him since that decades-ago conversation with Missouri. After all, he won't set foot in Lawrence again unless something a lot stronger than he is drags him back kicking and screaming and clawing at the ground.
A lot of people hate hospitals, are afraid of them, love them even. For John, they're just places. He's got good memories, like holding both his newborn sons in one on a couple of the best nights of his life. He's got bad memories, like holding those same sons in that same hospital, sooty and shocked into hollow silence, on the worst night of his life. And all along the steady middle of the scale are neutral memories of routine little surgeries and inoculations and getting minor wounds dressed by halfway decent nurses in field hospitals half a planet away. Just places. Even the haunted ones; just ain't all that much difference between a doctor ghost and any other kind, as he remembers telling Dean more than once.
This hospital, though. Abandoned for a good twenty years. And John's hated it since he heard the name. Silent Grove Inpatient Facility. He'd never say it out loud to anybody, because how stupid is it to be spooked by a name after the kind of shit he's seen, but something about "Silent Grove" just isn't right. If this were New England, he'd think it was the kind of place they hauled witches off to burn them back in darker times.
Place is haunted though, so he doesn't have a choice. At least salt-and-burns tend to be straightforward and light on the research, even if not exactly easy. Hopefully this one's the same, despite some witnesses he could have sworn were trying to get in his head.
"Any deaths in the building?" He was brusque when he interviewed a former director. Guy didn't seem like the type to need a soft touch and that's never been John's style, anyway.
"It was a hospital," the guy stated. Like he thought John was an idiot. Which definitely didn't make him ease up any.
"Ever see anything out of the ordinary? Flickering lights, maybe? Run into cold spots?"
"We all saw things." The director paused. John pressed.
"What?"
"People are probably gonna tell you it's haunted. The whole town believes it, all the kids. It's an urban legend. You got your hook-handed man, your Bloody Mary, and Silent Grove. And there's a grain of truth there, but I've heard a whole lot of ghost stories, and none of the things I saw or heard…" Once again, the director trailed off. "Well. Guess it could be ghosts. Don't know what else I'd say it is."
John tried not to let himself be all that unnerved. He could hear the kind of jokes Dean would crack if they were working this one together. This just in: civvies get scared by ghosts.
Now, standing outside Silent Grove with all his gear out and sundown a few minutes past, John can't stop thinking about how much he hates this building. It's ugly, but with a hell of a view, squat and boxy stucco overlooking a horizon-kissing stretch of Appalachian woodlands. Only two stories. Three if you're counting the basement, which because it was where the morgue was, is probably where he's gonna have to go. Great.
He half-wishes Dean were working this one with him. But every time John starts regretting the slack in his leash and reels him back in, he regrets that even more, because all the kid does is mope around and damn near pine. Never mind it's been three goddamn years since Sam took off and one since he decided he was too good to talk to his brother anymore - because John's not an idiot, he knows Dean palled around with him even after he gave him direct orders not to, all the way up 'til that bit him in the ass just the way John knew it would.
Three-quarters of the cases John's taken, he's worked alone. Most days, he's convinced he works better that way. He shakes off whatever the hell's wrong with him this time around and heads into the building, having to pry boards off a window and break the somehow-intact glass to do it.
The front desk area's still got a few chairs in it, though most of them are busted. John flicks on his light, scowls and shakes it when it flickers, but it evens out as he pans it across the water stains on the cream-colored linoleum. No ghosts yet. Just piles of garbage and what's either rat or squirrel shit.
He blinks when his beam hits the wall opposite the front doors. Something's written on it in black, letters too neat and narrow to be spray paint, too inconsistent to be any kind of stencil.
Should you be here?
John should read it for what it is: a pointed message from a groundskeeper or local law enforcement, meant to chase away thrill-seekers. Obviously an effective one, since it's the only graffiti in sight. But somehow it comes across as something a lot more ominous.
"Yeah," John says out loud, "I'm here to clear out the stuff that shouldn't."
He immediately feels like an idiot. If one of the boys had done something like that on a hunt, it would've earned them a swat to the back of the head. He almost feels like delivering one to himself, but instead just tries to move on, turning away from the wall and hoping nothing heard him. There's hallways in either direction, and he doesn't see a map like there might be in a modern hospital, and of course all the plans were missing from the local library when he checked. East's always felt luckier to him, especially in the last few years, so he swings that way.
He hasn't even made it two steps before there's a silent flutter of white light through the windows, and then a drumming hiss on the roof after a distant roll of thunder. He glances up, and of course, a minute later, his flashlight catches the glitter of a roof leak. He sighs.
Could be worse, he guesses. He could be having to trawl through the woods.
Course, now that he's thought that, the corpse he needs to torch will probably be outdoors.
The building itself went up mid-century, and it's got the narrow halls and doorways to prove it. There must be wider passages around here somewhere for wheelchairs, but obviously he's not in one, and John hates to admit even to himself it feels like these walls are creeping closer with every step, but they are. The dirty yellow color sure as hell isn't helping. He wonders if they haven't repainted since the fifties, or if what he's seeing is forty years of nicotine. Christ, is he ever glad Mary made him quit before she'd go steady with him.
The rain isn't helping this uncharacteristic claustrophobia, either. John doesn't hate (most) hospitals, but the sound of rain, he hasn't been able to stand that since he shipped out in the seventies. The hiss you get on certain materials, when you've got a certain frequency of falling raindrops, it's like one unending sinister exhale from a living thing. And it hides too goddamn much. Like footsteps.
No wonder it takes him so long to notice the guy. Or more likely, the thing.
All he catches in the beam of his flashlight when he jerks it up with a sudden realization is a blur of motion, something rounding the corner not that far ahead of him. He can't tell what it is beyond the fact it's person-shaped, which is no big surprise. John stops, swallows. Then he pulls his sawed-off out of the duffel slung across his back, makes sure it's loaded with rock salt rounds. Holding it at the ready, he moves forward. This isn't his first rodeo. It's not even his hundredth.
A weapon in his hand's always made him feel better. The uneasiness settles, and he picks up the pace, automatically checking doors and corners. Still no stairs, up or down. Place is a damn maze.
He doesn't start feeling it again, that almost-fear he doesn't want to admit is fear, the hate for this goddamn building, until he sees something for the second time. Once again, going around a corner just ahead of him, but this time, he catches it clearer. It's a man, probably young, tall-ish. Jeans and boots and a leather jacket, dark hair lighting up gold where it's cropped close to the skin on the back of his skull. He's gone in a second, like he doesn't even know John's there, but John's come to a stop again.
If he did not know better. Which he absolutely, fully does, because there's no damn way. He'd think that was Dean.
A father knows his son, back and front, like he does his own hand, but Dean checked in this morning and he's all the way up in Minnesota, swinging by Blue Earth to pick up some reliquaries from Pastor Jim because revenants are a bitch. Jim, who John suspects has never in his life told a lie, confirmed it when he asked. There's no way that Dean could have got down here in less than twelve hours just to...what? Walk around a haunted hospital just ahead of John, get one over on his old man? Kid's got the same sense of humor he had when he was twelve, but John feels perfectly confident he wouldn't do this.
It's just a ghost. Somebody who died here. It's a common look, especially was back when this place was operating, and it's definitely not Dean. John keeps moving, going around the corner.
He comes to a T-junction. And sure enough, there's the ghost again, same leather and denim and brush cut, turning down the left hallway. John grits his teeth. He's never been one to be led around by the nose, so he turns immediately to the right and moves quick.
Still no stairs. Just halls and doors that open into near-identical rooms. There's trash everywhere, the most predictable stuff, chip bags and newspapers and beer cans and dead leaves and dirt and cobwebs, all matted into piles against the walls by wetting and drying a thousand times over.
No graffiti, though. He hasn't seen any since…
Should you be here?
There it is again, drawn across the wall to his immediate right. The letters are bigger this time, and not as neat. A little warped. He can't tell if it was like that originally, or if it's from water damage to the paint. John shakes his head, keeps on moving.
It's still raining. The steady drip of water onto the linoleum's got John's back teeth aching, almost like there's a radio somewhere turned to a bad frequency. It twinges down his jaw and neck whenever he turns his head.
It's probably twenty or thirty minutes before he sees another ghost, he doesn't bother checking his watch, but it feels like it happens immediately. He thinks it's a ghost, at first. Turning a corner just ahead of him, same shtick the other one had, they need a new routine. But then the appearance sinks in. The towering, almost willowy height, hoodie paired with baggy jeans and sneakers, dark hair flopping in long curls over the neck.
Last thing John ever saw of Sam was the back, so it's burned pretty fierce into his memory. Like a cigarette butt touched to the inside of a thigh. He's distinctive in a way Dean isn't, a way John really tried to train out of him. And Sam? After all the shit he's pulled recently? Well, John could see him driving two days just to fuck with him.
Probably. No other explanation, he's never run into a shapeshifter like this before. Just the possibility of Sam coming back to do this of all things has an acid pulse thumping furious in John's stomach.
"Sam?" he calls out before he can think better of it. "Sam! I know that's you. Game's over." He strides right to the end of the hall and swings hard around the corner, swearing loudly when his boots skid in a puddle and he nearly winds up on the floor. "Get over here. Right now. You oughta know I'm not in the mood."
Sam, the little shit, doesn't respond. John's not really sure he expected him to, but something twitches in his temples anyway. Somehow, even with how fast he's moving himself, Sam's made it all the way to the end of this very long hallway, is turning another corner. The angle makes it impossible for John to see his face. Still just the back of him.
"Sam!" John bellows after him, and there's nothing, no response. He doesn't look, doesn't flinch in the last half-second John can see him, and then he's gone.
If he wants to catch him, John needs to pick up the pace. It's as he's standing there though, his own voice ringing back to him down the hallway, that he starts to doubt. That he hesitates.
He knows his boys. He knows he does. He could pick them out of a lineup if he were half-blind and they were wearing masks. He knows their hair, their gaits, the way they hold their arms and heads.
Would he bet his life on the two of them being here, though? On even Sam being here? Is he sure that was him? Or were the shoulders a little too narrow, the legs a little too long? Was there something off about the color of the hair? Off for any person?
This place is getting to him. John's not going to let it. If it's Sam, he's gonna find out real soon, because he'll catch up to him. Too bad he's already wasted so much time standing here second-guessing himself.
He makes it to the turn, shotgun in one hand and flashlight in the other. He hopes for Sam's sake it's not him, or else he might just wind up with an ass full of rock salt. That's what happens when you play ghost.
It's not Sam he sees down the next hallway, though. It's Dean, or the thing that kind of looks like him. Ducking into one of the rooms.
It takes John seconds to catch up. If it really is Dean, if Sam somehow talked him into this and he somehow got down here in time to pull it off (seems unlikely, but John's angry enough to believe it), he's got him now. But when he kicks the door open, half ready to fire into the ceiling just to teach the two of them a lesson, there's no one there.
Well. That answers that, then.
He does a quick sweep just to be sure, but the room isn't that big. Dirty floor, some garbage in the corners, a few puddles where the linoleum's buckled and water's shimmering through the drop ceiling in long strands. The only thing in here's an iron bedframe John can't imagine anybody bigger than a six-year-old fitting in, which is somehow unnerving in a way he knows it shouldn't be.
There's a window in here, surprisingly large. It looks out over the forest, dark and misty with rain. Lightning flickers off in the distance, in the clouds. John only sees it for half a heartbeat, but it's not ordinary lightning, a cluster of splintered red jellyfish shapes up there above the horizon.
He thinks they call those sprites or something. The pilots talked about them when he was still serving. He's just not sure they're supposed to be this close to the ground.
John swallows and turns away from the window. And there he is, feet away, vanishing around the doorway, fucking Sam, he could have reached out and grabbed him if the shock of it didn't freeze him in place -
He recovers fast. He's way too angry to care there's no feasible way Sam could have made it into the room without him noticing, no closet or bathroom or anywhere to hide. He charges out, nearly dropping the gun in his readiness to take hold of his youngest and wring his skinny damn neck, looking wildly around. There's Sam again, and he's nowhere nearby despite the fact there was almost zero distance between them, he's going around the corner at the end of the hall. John doesn't give himself time to think about how that's also impossible, just goes right after him. He doesn't care anymore about trying to stay quiet.
He follows his sons deeper and deeper, into the guts of the abandoned hospital. Sometimes it's Sam he's after, sometimes it's Dean; they swap out every few turns, always far enough ahead of him he only catches the barest glimpse of their backs. He'd wonder how they were pulling it off if he weren't so mad. More red pulses into his vision with every turn, an imagined conversation between the two of them growing in his head like a tumor, Sam deciding to fuck with him just for the hell of it because nothing's sacred to him and Dean getting dragged along because god knows he's never had any balls at all when it comes to his brother.
He calls out a few times, he threatens. Of course it doesn't do any good. Sam is stubborn as a jackass and apparently twice as fast, and John knows exactly where he gets the first trait from.
You shouldn't be here. He passes it three more times, in hallways, in rooms, tailing the boys. You shouldn't be here. You shouldn't be here.
The hospital didn't look this big from the outside. It didn't look like it could possibly have this many rooms, this many hallways. He hasn't been in the same place twice and he thinks he's been here hours.
Once, when the boys were still small, Dean in the lower grades but Sam too young for school, John came home and couldn't find him anywhere. He tore the room apart, he screamed 'til he tasted blood, he harassed everybody in the damn building and still couldn't turn him up. Until Sam, who'd wedged himself under the front seat of the car, finally decided to crawl on out and reveal his grand hide-and-seek joke. John took him by the shoulders and shook him and shouted until he was crying hard enough to nearly knock himself out, knowing he was a toddler but wanting, needing him to feel a fraction of what he had these past few hours. The metal-sick twist of horror and fury, jaws of a shark shoved through his stomach and under his ribs.
Sam's got a hell of a lot more to answer for now than he did back then.
John doesn't pause, doesn't even think, head too full of thumping heat that makes his vision pulse from behind, until he sees somebody (something) that isn't either of his sons. Caught right as he goes around a corner, just like every single other time. Broad shoulders, short black hair. A duffel bag slanted across the back.
It's harder to recognize yourself from behind than it is the people you love. John thinks he does anyway.
He's stopped again, middle of the hallway, doors on either side, darkness utterly complete except for his flashlight, total silence besides the drip of water. He tastes dust in his dry mouth and his heart is pulping itself on his ribs, and he doesn't think it's only from the running. His breath shakes in his lungs.
He guesses there's maybe more than doors, he's somehow stopped perfectly between two pieces of graffiti. On his right, Should you be here? yet again. On the left, finally something different: Has it always been like this?
What the fuck is wrong with him, that he thought his boys could be here? That he chased this thing, these things, so deep into this damp, terrible shell of a building?
What the hell is he dealing with here? It's impossible three people who look exactly like him, Dean, and Sam died in this place, and ghosts don't pull goddamn memories out of your head to mimic the living.
Where in the hell is he? How long's he been running? How far from the entrance?
John aches under the weight of knowing how goddamn stupid he's been. Maybe fatally so. This isn't even a rookie mistake, it's a civilian one, and here he's got two decades in the life under his belt...he's not gonna be sharing this one over a few fingers of whiskey anytime soon, that's for sure.
Sometimes joking helps. It doesn't right now. He wants to open the nearest door and fling himself through the room's window, and it doesn't matter how far he falls so long as he's out of this place. It crawls under his skin like a million biting ants.
But he has a job to do, and the work is never done. He hasn't seen anything remotely resembling a basement entrance, and there's nothing to suggest the haunting (though he's less sure by the second that's what it is) is pinned to the morgue. He doesn't have any other option at this point, with how lost he's got himself. So he starts walking quietly, uselessly forward.
Yet another identical hallway when he goes around the corner. But this time, there's no flash of movement at the end, and one door three-quarters of the way up the right side is open. John forces himself towards it. His gun feels about as comforting as a dry stick in his hand.
He already halfway knows what he's going to find inside. When he reaches the doorway and sees the back of himself, he isn't surprised. The duffel bag's gone. He catches himself wondering uselessly where it went, even though it couldn't matter less.
It's facing the window. There's no light coming through the glass at all. Not until that weird lightning strikes again, less than a second of flash outlining John's halfway-familiar shape in red and burning jellyfish over the forest into his retinas. The shape of them, it's almost unspeakable. They feel like something that shouldn't be allowed to happen, and John has somehow never believed in God less than he does at that exact second.
He knows with sudden, sickening certainty, a knowing that grabs him by the throat and presses the breath out of him, that it's going to talk. The thing in front of him. And he can only stand here and listen to it, until it's finished speaking.
He can only hope it won't turn around, because if he sees its face, he is absolutely positive in this moment that he will die, and it won't be a good death.
"Should you be here?"
It's not his voice. Part of John thinks it might have actually been better if it was.
His flashlight sizzles, flickers. He gives it a violent shake as panic surges ice-cold and sparking to the top of his head. Once the light's steady again, he sees two more figures, the Sam and Dean things facing into the corners on either side of the window.
More red lightning.
"Has it always been like this?" the Dean-thing says, not in Dean's voice.
"You shouldn't be here," the Sam-thing says. Not in Sam's voice.
No one, including John, says anything for what must be a full minute. And then, as if somebody gave some awful cue, they all three start to turn to face him.
Maybe John ought to start believing in God, because his flashlight chooses that exact second to die.
He can't stumble backwards out of the doorway fast enough. He can't run blind down the hallways fast enough. He can't push himself hard enough, go far enough, and he has no idea where he's going and just hopes wildly he doesn't fall, doesn't feel hands on his arms or up his jacket or in his hair, until he bursts through the front doors and straight into a stinging sheet of rain that slices straight into the core of him. It won't be until tomorrow morning that he remembers those doors were boarded shut when he arrived.
The rain half-freezes him almost instantly, but he has to stand in it for a few minutes to throw violently up. Apparently, his body has something it absolutely has to get rid of before it'll let him straighten up and weave drunkenly back to his truck.
Only two things in John's entire life have been harder than staying in town. But he does it. He waits the few days it takes for the place to dry out. He lays awake and whiskey-soaked in his motel room, listening to the drip of condensation off his air conditioner, watching shadows on the ceiling. Then he goes back with a truck bed full of gas cans and road salt.
It looks like the entire town turns out to watch the fire. Including Silent Grove's former director, who wanders over to John as he's standing and watching with his hands in his pocket. He's not in the mood for any kind of conversation, but he doesn't notice him until it's too late, mesmerized by how very red most of the flames are.
"You saw it." It's a flat statement. "It wasn't a ghost. Was it?"
John looks at the director. They make eye contact for one very long, very bad second.
"No idea what you're talking about," John answers shortly, and goes to haul himself into the cab.