AN: Inspired by a bunch of different things, including an episode of Doctor Who, a song I first heard at a county fair when I was a teenager, and a very old, gruesome folk tale. I'll tell you about all three of those things...at the end of the story. If you do guess any of them, it's fine to put that in a comment and I'll let you know if you're right because this story doesn't directly mirror any of them. My feeling is that someone will figure out the Doctor Who ep but the song is too obscure and the folk tale is not referenced directly enough for anyone to figure out, but I know better than to doubt you readers!

The reemergence of an OC from my most recent story is 75% due to Jenjoremy requesting it and 25% due to Janice figuring out how I could work him in. What can I say? When the muse cooperates, I'm happy to go along with readers' ideas! There's no reason to read that story to understand this one; I give a super brief summary of how Sam and Dean know the guy. He actually ends up playing a bigger role than I'd anticipated.

Janice, naturally, lent her beta skills despite being wicked busy (as my New England pals might say).

Set in season 2. Sam has his psychic powers and John is gone, having made the deal with Azazel to save Dean's life. The Impala is all fixed up.

* * *

It's a little-known fact that the whippoorwill doesn't merely sing a nonsense song, tra-la-laing like the larks and sparrows and whatnot. For anyone who is willing to listen, the whippoorwill has a warning.

Do you ever catch sight of something at the very edge of your vision, but when you turn your head, there's nothing there? Do you shrug it off and take a drink or tell a joke to wash away the hint of unease you feel? Or do you listen to the conviction that it wasn't a mirage or a hair cutting across your vision or your imagination? Do you ever entertain the idea that those glimpses are of something real? Something that you're not supposed to see? If so, look away. Forget about it. Tell yourself it was nothing.

Don't look, the whippoorwill sings. Don't see, it warns. You should listen.

WINCHESTER * WINCHESTER

Rodney gripped his hair with both hands and desperately chanted to himself.

Ten doors. Not eleven. T – E – N. One, zero. Tententententen. Four rooms per side, a door to the stair at each end. Four plus four plus one plus one equals TEN.

There was nothing on the ends of the hall, nothing but blank walls, no windows or even paintings with colors muted by age.

Yet door eleven refused to go away.

Rodney wasn't supposed to see it. He somehow knew that, wasn't supposed to turn and look, but he had. The door looked ordinary except for its extra large keyhole, but the very sight of it had filled him with dread. Not the dread of an adult but the marrow-deep dread of a young child too young to articulate its fear or the limb-leadening dread of a nightmare.

Now that Rodney had looked, it was the only thing he could see, no matter how hard he tried to scrub it from his brain. He closed his eyes and still it loomed. Suddenly panicked, he ran blindly down the hall and down the stairs and out the front door, batting away a bird that flew in his face to reach for his car and...found himself standing in front of the door again. The eleventh door.

Rodney recoiled in abject horror. He was looking straight at it, and that meant that it was looking back.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" he babbled. "I didn't mean to! I didn't mean to see!"

It was too late. Blood, thick as tar, oozed slowly from the keyhole. The whole door seemed to rise and fall rhythmically as if it were breathing. Beyond his control, Rodney saw his hand rise. In it was an old-fashioned iron key he'd never seen before. The handle was a face, twisted and gargoyle-esque with an amused leer and a long tongue curling out. As Rodney tried to open his hand to drop the key, the tongue unrolled and wrapped itself around Rodney's wrist tightly enough to draw blood. It didn't matter – he could neither open his hand nor stop it from moving the key toward the door as if in slow motion.

The black tongue grew and grew, twining around more and more of Rodney's arm, so cold it burned. Rodney's blood dripped into the growing pool of the much darker ichor that kept seeping from the keyhole.

Rodney screamed and screamed and screamed, but only in his mind, his body no longer his own. Finally, his hand pushed the key into the bloody lock.

Then the hallway was empty and pristine, the rich red carpet perfectly clean, and all ten doors were neatly closed.

Downstairs, Miss Caroline tidied the shelf of tourism brochures she'd always found far too tacky for such a stately old house. But she'd never say a word because she was just the help, and it didn't matter that she was the last who remembered its glory days.

Thinking of those better days, Caroline hummed a little song and wondered what was taking her new boss so long upstairs.

WINCHESTER * WINCHESTER

Sam dug a knuckle into his temple. He was so sick of his head hurting. For months, lack of sleep and the weight of grief from Jessica's shocking death had gifted him with a near-constant ache at the base of his skull. No sooner had that begun to abate than he'd become acquainted with the excruciating pain of visions. He'd never told Dean, but Sam's head ached for days after each one. He'd long since given up on medicating himself against headaches.

But this headache was something different. It was just painful enough to be annoying and had started in the most mundane way possible. A little brown bird had perched on the crumbling outside sill of their motel room and trilled its song over and over louder than something so small should have been able to accomplish.

The sound drilled right into Sam's brain and woke him up from night's sleep already severely shortened by a b-and-e to retrieve a cute little statue with the nasty habit of stopping its owners' hearts. Getting and destroying the thing had taken most of the night.

Not content just to wake him, the bird continued its weet-weet-brrrrr over and over with persistence that was borderline demented.

It wasn't all that loud, nor was it discordant, yet for some reason the song lit up the pain receptors in Sam's brain. "Oh, shut up," he moaned, though only in his own mind. Far worse than being awakened so early (the sun wasn't even fully up) would be waking Dean up so early.

Hunter-quiet, Sam scooped up some clothes and slipped into the bathroom. He'd go scare the bird off, he decided, and figure out from there if it was worth trying to get more sleep or if he should just find some industrial-strength coffee. He grimaced at his reflection as he brushed his teeth. He looked – surprise! – like he'd gotten less than two hours of sleep and awakened to a wicked headache. He remembered Dad's "cure" for mornings like this – a dash of whiskey in a cup of coffee strong enough to dissolve a spoon – and rode out the wave of sadness that followed. He was well-versed in mourning by now.

As quiet as Sam was, when he crept out of the bathroom, Dean was awake. "Vision, nightmare, or bad bed springs?" he asked in a voice heavy with sleep.

"Bird."

Dean's head came up fractionally. "Bird? What bird?"

Sam realized that his tormentor was gone, and his headache immediately eased. He sighed, this time in relief. "It was just outside our window, screeching. Gone now."

"Then take some Tylenol and go back to bed," Dean ordered, burying his face in his pillow. "If the mean birdie comes back, I'll shoot it for you."

"You're a moron," Sam informed his brother. He didn't bother to question how Dean knew he needed the Tylenol or even take his jeans back off, just swallowed a couple pills dry and climbed back into bed. Amazingly, wonderfully, he fell back to sleep.

The next time Sam woke, it was much later and Dean's phone was ringing on the nightstand between their beds. Dean grabbed it and answered, "Yeah?" After a pause, he said, "Who's asking?" In response to whatever he heard, he sat up. "I'm putting you on speaker. Say that again," he told the caller. Dean set the phone back on the nightstand and Sam couldn't quite decide what his expression was doing.

"Um. Okay," the voice from the phone said. It was a man, probably older, and he didn't sound familiar to Sam. "I don't know if you'll remember me. I go by Paul Damask now, but you knew me as Paul Hull. We, uh, met in North Adams, Massachusetts."

Sam sat up too. Late winter when Sam was fifteen, he and Dean had been in North Adams without Dad and had stumbled into a massive hunt. Unfortunately, it had put them in the sights of the Hull family, who'd hunted witches and their pets for years, and the Hulls had come to believe Sam and Dean were witches themselves. It had been a long, painful, ordeal, and in the end, Paul had helped them get away alive. Dad and Bobby had let him go while ensuring the rest of the family went to jail.

"We remember," Dean grunted sounding very much not happy with the memory.

"So it is Dean Winchester?"

"Sam's here too," Sam interjected, ignoring Dean's dirty look. There was no reason to keep his presence secret from Paul.

"Oh. Well, good. Um. I tried to call your dad, but his voicemail directed me to you guys. I'm not hunting or anything. I just wanted to put that all behind me after – after what happened to you boys, but it's hard to turn off the instinct, you know? So a couple times over the years I've seen something in the paper and given your dad a call. I don't know if he's ever mentioned that."

"Our Dad passed away a little while back," Sam said tightly, so Dean didn't have to. He reasoned that it was no surprise that he hadn't recognized Paul's voice, not only because of the number of years since they'd talked to him, but his accent had faded, and there was even the barest hint of a southern drawl to it now. Sam wondered if that was deliberate, part of building a new life.

"I'm sorry, guys." Paul sounded it, too. Fortunately, he didn't ask for any details. Sam pictured him as they'd known him – about six feet tall, blond, in his mid-fifties, a little soft around the middle and with the hands of a working man. He'd been competent and kind, caught up in his family's insanity and blaming himself for not putting it to a stop before Sam and Dean had been hurt.

"Just tell us what's going on," Dean gruffed, never good with sympathy.

"Right. Well, when I was about 20, I heard my grandparents fighting. See, my grandma had been a Hunter herself before settling down, and she wanted the family to go out and chase down monsters and ghosts and all of it, but Grandpa was obsessed with the Houghton case to the exclusion of everything else. Grandma even had a case she wanted to take up – the Minzou family."

Paul paused to clear his throat, so Sam said, "We're listening." He knew Dean was already getting impatient with the recitation.

"A few years ago, I came into contact with a man named Don Minzou, though I didn't remember the name at the time, probably because he was a totally ordinary guy. Don died recently – he was in his 80's so nothing odd there – and his nephew inherited everything. Then the nephew disappeared off the face of the earth. He was visiting an old house that was part of the inheritance, and he never came back out. It's kind of a little museum now, and there's no way Rodney could have left without passing the lady who works at the front desk. Every inch of the house has been searched and there's no sign of him. And there's nothing in his life to suggest he'd run off – he's wealthy and successful and recently engaged." Paul's summary was excellent, Sam thought. He probably could have been a great Hunter, or a least a resource to Hunters.

"I finally remembered the last name and my grandparents' argument, so I did a little digging. The Minzou family was a huge, thriving clan about four or five generations ago. They were an important family in their little town of Centerville, Georgia. Then they started disappearing. Not all of them – just a handful each generation. Some people around them, too. Servants. Friends. People from the town. Enough that most Minzous eventually left Georgia entirely, until Don was the only one here, though he didn't live in the old house. Now his nephew is in town three days and he's gone." Paul sighed. "Don was a good man. A very generous man. I'd like to know what happened to his last close relative."

"You can't be the first one that's noticed this," Dean said, almost accusing. He wasn't actually angry, Sam knew. He was tired and didn't like to be reminded about Dad. The memories of North Adams weren't especially good, either, though in the end the two of them had dispatched a huge, kick-ass monster on their own and the sale of some of the items they'd confiscated from the Hulls had helped their funds for years afterwards. It did make a pretty good "remember when" story that they'd occasionally rehash after a night of drinking or during a particularly long, tiresome drive.

"Of course not. There have been some investigations over the years, especially when the family was so prominent, but the police never find any sign of foul play. And lately, it's been almost all tourists going missing, which generates a lot less outrage." Paul blew out a breath. "It's a white whale case, you know? A cop or fed seems to pick it up once in a while, determined to make their career by finally solving it, but no dice and it goes cold again. So...what do you think?"

Sam and Dean looked at each other, Sam communicating that Dean should answer. "Look, Paul, we were up all night on a case in Kentucky. We need to talk this through before giving you an answer. I'll call you in about an hour." With that, Sam knew they were taking the case because Dean wouldn't have given Paul even that much information if he didn't think there was something to it. Paul thanked them and Dean hung up, already reaching for his bag.

"You look into it and I'll get coffee?" Dean grunted, part question, part direction.

Sam nodded and checked the time as he got up to get the laptop. He'd gotten a good five hour's sleep after all was said and done, and the headache was mostly a memory. The statue they'd come here to track down for Bobby had been salted and burned and buried, and he figured they'd be on their way to Georgia by noon to see if they could solve a mystery and maybe save some lives. The family business.

* * *

AN: I got nothin'. Weird. Unless you need to know that the whippoorwill is a small bird named for what its call sounds like. Or that a "white whale case" implies it's one that inspires obsession, like the titular white whale in Moby Dick.