We'd been driving for hours. Texas is a whole lotta much the same, with very little variety in the scenery as you're driving. I'd pulled out an old tatting project I hadn't worked on in a few months. It'd taken quite a while to 'read' the bits I'd already done and work out the pattern I'd forgotten in the intervening time. Currently, I'd lowered the tatting to my lap, feeling slightly queasy after so long focusing on it while in a moving vehicle.
Dean was driving, nodding his head slightly to the music, and Sam was sprawled in the passenger seat, his head lolling back and his mouth hanging open as he slept.
Dean glanced at Sam as I watched, then grabbed a plastic spoon from the last food stop that we'd taken to go. He gently inserted the spoon into Sam's mouth then pulled out his phone and twisted slightly in his seat to take a photo. I kept my eyes on the road while he did this, but Dean is an excellent driver and the car barely wavered from her course down the miles of straight road.
Phone safely stowed in his pocket, Dean spun the volume knob to turn the music up loud and sang along as loudly as he could, "Fire...of unknown origins...took my baby away!" Before launching into a headbanging drum solo against the steering wheel.
Sam jerked upright, froze for a second, before flapping both hands in front of his face in an effort to rid himself of the spoon. He looked a little as if he were trying to defend himself from angry bees rather than a spoon.
He shot a bitchface at Dean while turning the music back down to a reasonable level. "Ha ha, very funny."
Dean chuckled, "Sorry, not a lot of scenery here in East Texas, kinda gotta make your own."
"We're not kids anymore, Dean. We're not going to start that crap up again." Sam said with irritation.
"Start up what?" Dean may sound innocent, but he can't fool us; we know him far too well.
"That prank stuff. It's stupid, and it always escalates."
"Aw, what's the matter Sammy, scared you're going to get a little Nair in your shampoo again huh?"
I smirked slightly at the reminder and quietly turned my attention back to my tatting.
Dean had been snickering slightly all the time Sam had been in the bathroom, a look of expectant glee on his face everytime he glanced at the bathroom door.
I stayed out of it. I watched with interest, picking up the mess after each prank but not participating. The boys had learned the hard way not to prank the person who provides their food and we'd come to our current arrangement several prank wars ago.
There was a sudden scent of fear from the bathroom, growing in pitch and I stood up from where I was checking Sam's maths homework at the table and glared at Dean, "What did you do?"
Dean's eyes lit up and he pursed his lips together, shaking from the effort of not laughing.
"DEAN!" Sam came bursting out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel and still wet from his shower, his hair dripping down his face. "I'M GOING TO KILL YOU!"
Dean howled with laughter, almost tripping as he darted around the table to place himself behind me.
Sam advanced on us and shook his fists at Dean, dark brown hairs dripping water from between his fingers. Lots of dark brown hairs. My eyes shot up to his head; his hair was actually running away with the rivulets of water dripping down his face!
"Sam! Your hair! What..." I turned to the shaking teen behind me, "What did you DO?!"
My momentary panic was replaced with anger as I watched Dean laughing. He was clearly behind this, and Sam was therefore not in any danger. Though Dean might be if Sam got to him.
I led Sam back to the bathroom, helped him clean up the hair that was simply falling from his scalp at this point and promised to crochet him a variety of hats. Not that Sam seemed overly pleased with this prospect. I then put an end to the prank war and told Dean that he could explain to Dad why his youngest son now looked like an angry chemo patient.
"All right, just remember; you started it." Sam crossed his arms and glared out the window.
"Bring it on, Baldy!"
"Where are we anyway?" I asked, mostly just to change the subject.
"A few hours outside of Richardson. Gimme the lowdown again?"
Sam pulled his laptop open on his lap. "All right, about a month or two ago this group of kids goes poking around in this local haunted house."
"Haunted by what?"
"Apparently, a pretty misogynistic spirit. Legend goes, it takes girls and strings them up in the rafters. Anyway this group of kids see this dead girl hanging in the cellar."
"Anybody ID the corpse?"
"Well, that's the thing. By the time the cops got there the body was gone. So cops are saying the kids were just yanking chains."
"Maybe the cops are right." I put in.
"Maybe, but I read a couple of the kids' firsthand accounts. They seemed pretty sincere."
"Where'd you read these accounts?" Dean asked.
Sam shifted in his seat in embarrassment and Dean and I immediately took note. "Well, I knew we were going to be passing through Texas. So, umm, last night, I surfed some local... paranormal websites. And I found one."
"And what's it called." Dean asked with a slight smirk in his voice.
I winced slightly at the pull of stitches in my side as I leaned forward to read over Sam's shoulder: " "
Dean snorted, "Lemme guess, streaming live out of Mom's basement."
Sam grinned at our gentle ribbing, "Yeah, probably."
"Most of those websites wouldn't know a ghost if it bit 'em in the persqueeter."
"What's a persqueeter?" I asked. I can infer, but I'm just being a little shit.
"Somewhere you don't want to be bitten." Dean shot back.
"Look." Sam sighed heavily at our antics, "We let Dad take off. Which was a mistake, by the way. We got Ali more or less patched up. Now we don't know where the hell Dad is, so meantime we gotta find ourselves something to hunt. There's no harm checking this thing out."
By 'more or less' he meant that he'd exchanged my field bandages for pressure bandages in the back of the car and once we'd driven far away and stopped at a motel the boys had flushed the cuts with saline, stitched me up and set up a drip of coconut water. We've found in the past that transfusions of human blood aren't exactly beneficial for me. Coconut water or goats milk don't do any damage though, so we try to keep an in-date bottle of coconut water in the boot of the car. Partly for me, but it also works fine for humans too.
I'd woken the next morning, groggy and in pain still, but no longer in danger from my injuries. The healing process is slow as always but it had been a couple of weeks, the boys were both fully healed and my cuts had been kept clean. The lack of infection is always a bonus, the new skin was forming and the cuts starting to close.
I do envy humans scar tissue; it might not be pretty, but it sure is functional.
We'd interviewed the local kids who'd claimed to have seen the dead girl. The stories were all very different in the details, (one had rather worryingly described the girl as "hot, in a dead kinda way") but they all agreed that Craig had been the one to show them the house and tell them about the ghost who supposedly haunted it.
We'd tracked this Craig Thurston to the record store that he worked at and paid him a visit the following day. The store was pretty empty when we arrived, it was bright and spacious with music playing in the background and the dusty smell of old records in the air.
A teenage boy was behind the counter and he greeted us as the door swung shut behind us. "Fellas. Can I help you with anything?"
Sam and Dean started to interview the boy, posing as reporters from the Dallas Morning News as I leaned on my crutch and hobbled over to the nearest display of records, flicking through them idly while listening to the conversation behind me.
"We're doing an article on local hauntings and rumour has it you might know of one."
"You mean the Hell House?" Craig's voice was shaken, but it didn't reflect in his emotional state, "I didn't think there was anything to the story."
"Why don't you tell us the story." Sam prompted.
"Well," Craig had the exact air of someone settling in to tell a scary story around the campfire, "supposedly back in the '30s this farmer, Mordechai Murdoch, used to live in this house with his six daughters. It was during the Depression, his crops were failing, he didn't have enough money to feed his own children. So I guess that's when he went off the deep end. I guess he figured it was best if his girls died quick, rather than starve to death. So he attacked them. They screamed, begged for him to stop but he just strung 'em up, one after the other. And when he was all finished he just turned around and hung himself. Now they say that his spirit is trapped in the house forever, stringing up any other girl that goes inside."
"Where'd you hear all this?" Dean asked him.
"My cousin Dana told me. I don't know where she heard it from. Ya gotta realize, I - I didn't believe this for a second."
"But now you do."
"I don't know what the hell to think, man. You guys, I - I'll tell you exactly what I told the police, okay? That girl was real. And she was dead. This was not a prank. I swear to God, I don't wanna go anywhere near that house ever again, okay?"
The boys thanked him and left. Craig smiled slightly after they were gone before turning to me, "Need any help?"
"I'm just browsing." I told him moving to the next set of records.
"Okay, just shout if you need anything." He returned to the counter and I browsed the records I had no intention of buying for a while longer before limping out the door with a smile and a small wave.
"Can't say I blame the kid." Sam commented, referring to Craig's desire not to return as we sloshed through the mud to the dilapidated 'Hell House'.
"Yeah," Dean agreed, "so much for curb appeal."
Dean pulled the EMF meter from his pocket as Sam completed a circle of the outside of the house. "I can sense people inside." I told Dean, tilting my head as I regarded the building. The scents were faint, but recent; a mixture of thrill and anxiety.
"People? Not ghosts?" Dean questioned, fiddling with the EMF meter that was squealing in his hands.
"Just people, thrill seekers I should think. And the faded scents of fear from those kids who found the girl. But there's no Deathcry, so whether she was just an echo or a hallucination, she didn't die here recently."
Sam came back from his inspection of the outside of the house, "You got something?"
"The EMF's no good," Dean surmised, turning it off and returning it to his pocket as he glanced at the overhead power lines. "I think that thing's still got a little juice in it. It's screwing with all the readings. Ali says there are ghost hunters inside, and the girl the kids saw didn't die here."
"In fact," I added, flicking mud from the end of my crutch, "I'm pretty sure Craig and his cousin Dana set the whole thing up as a hoax. Craig seemed pretty pleased with himself after you guys left."
"Great," Dean muttered, "wastin' our time. Come on then." He led the way to the front door of the house. Opening it with a suitably creepy squeak from the hinges and pulling a torch from his pocket.
Dean whistled, shining the torch on the walls and illuminating the various symbols that had been painted there. "Looks like old man Murdock was a bit of a tagger here in his time."
"And after his time too." Sam gestured at a couple of the symbols, "That reverse cross has been used by Satanists for centuries but this sigil of sulfur didn't show up in San Francisco until the '60s."
"That is exactly why you never get laid." Dean informed him before moving to inspect another symbol. "Hey what about this one, you seen this one before?"
It was a plus sign with a dot in the middle and the bottom line was shaped like an upside down question mark. "That's the logo for Blue Öyster Cult." I'd seen it on one of the albums I'd been browsing just that morning.
Sam snorted and scratched at the symbol, "It's paint. Seems pretty fresh too."
"I don't know, guys. You know I hate to agree with authority figures of any kind, but ... the cops may be right about this one."
There was movement behind a door and Sam and Dean tensed, "Chill, it's the thrill seekers I told you about, from the sounds of it they're ghost hunting." I'd heard the quiet murmur of their anxious whispers for a while now.
"Reckon we should tell them it's a bust?"
"Sure, I'll do it!" I grinned and hobbled forwards. Misery loves company; my leg was hurting and ruining someone else's day sounded great!
I pushed the door open and raised a hand to shield my eyes from the torchlight suddenly being shone in my face.
"Oh, cut. It's just humans." Excuse you! Human indeed!
There were two guys, one holding a small electrical gadget, the other a camera, which he switched off. They were exactly what I would picture if asked to imagine nerds who live in their Mums' basement and hunt ghosts for funsies; pale and of a nervous disposition.
"What are you guys doing here?" The same guy spoke again.
"Same as you," I smiled and tapped a chicken foot that was nailed to the door frame above my head, "looking for ghosts. Pity this one's a bust, really."
"What do you mean?" The guy holding the camera asked.
"I mean these feet are fresh, -ish, the symbols were painted a couple of months ago and the girl those kids saw in the cellar is named Dana. She's in perfect health." I leaned against the door frame and shifted the weight off my bad leg. "No ghosts, just a story and a bunch of kids who got punked."
The first guy snorted, "We're professional Paranormal Investigators, young lady, I think we know a bit more about this than you do."
"Oh, you gotta be kidding me." Dean muttered from behind me.
"Take a look at that." The guy said handing me a business card.
"Ed Zeddmore and Harry Spengler?" Sam shone a torch onto the card over my shoulder, "You guys run that website."
"Yeah." The guy seemed legitimately proud.
"Oh yeah, yeah, we're huge fans." Dean mocked, sliding passed me into the room, which appeared to have been a kitchen.
"And, ahh, we know who you guys are too."
"Oh yeah?"
"Amateurs. Looking for ghosts and cheap thrills."
I snorted. We were the amateurs? I am one of the paranormal creatures these guys think they're qualified to investigate!
"Yep. So if you guys don't mind, we're trying to conduct a serious scientific investigation here."
"Yeah, what have you got so far?"
"Harry, why doncha tell 'em about EMF?" The first guy looked a little smug.
"EMF?" Sam played dumb, I could hear the laughter in his voice.
"Electromagnetic field? Spectral entities can cause energy fluctuations that can be read with an EMF detector. Like this bad boy right here." He held up an unnecessarily large piece of kit and powered it on, "Whoa. Whoa. It's 2.8mg."
"2.8. It's hot in here." The first guy, who must be Ed, seemed to have a flair for the dramatic.
Dean whistled and Sam uttered a mocking "Wow."
"Couldn't that be explained by the power cables that run over the house?" Harry and Ed both gave me dirty looks before Harry powered the EMF meter off.
Electromagnetic fields are so named because they are generated by the movement of electrical current creating a magnetic field. The same works in reverse, electric current can be induced by a magnetic field, which is how the EMF reader works.
"So you guys ever really seen a ghost before, or..."
"Once. We were, uh...we were investigating this old house and we saw a vase fall right off the table..." Ed's tone was exactly what you would use when telling scary stories around a campfire.
"By itself." Harry added.
"Well, we, we didn't actually see it, we heard it. And something like that...it uh...it changes you."
"Really." I deadpanned. "That's the closest you've come to a ghost."
"You don't believe in ghosts, do you?" Ed asked me.
"Seeing is believing, and I can assure you that I do believe." I straightened and allowed that to sink in for a moment. "But there's no ghost here. I recommend you go home, update your website to say this was a hoax and we all go find some real ghosts."
I turned and started limping towards the exit, "Make sure you update your website, this building doesn't look safe and the last thing we want is local kids investigating and winding up getting hurt."
Ed started laughing as we left and I heard him tell Harry, "I'm sorry. That pot we smoked gave me the giggles." Yeah, real professionals those two.
Sam and I left the library a few hours later and met up with Dean as he was returning to the car. We may have told the 'professionals' that this was nothing more than a hoax, but we needed to cover all bases just in case. And to save Sam's pride, since this hunt had been his idea and he wasn't happy to let it go just yet.
Sam was first to give his findings; "I couldn't find a Mordechai but I did find a Martin Murdock who lived in that house in the '30s. He did have children but only two of them, both boys, and there's no evidence he ever killed anyone."
"Craig's cousin Dana isn't local and wouldn't have been recognised by anyone local. She goes to TCU and would have been on break when the kids saw her in the house."
"What about you?" Sam asked Dean as we reached the car.
"Well, those kids didn't really give us a clear description of that dead girl but I did hit up the police station. No matching missing persons. Dude, come on, we did our digging, man, this one's a bust all right. I say we find ourself a bar and some beers and leave the legend to the locals."
Dean got into the car and I moved to follow, but then stopped; Sam wasn't getting in. He was leaning down to watch Dean through the window with a smirk on his face. I stepped back.
Dean turned the key in the ignition. Latino pop-dance music blasted from the speakers and the wipers turned on. "WHOA! What the..." Dean jumped in his seat, then quickly turned everything off.
Sam laughed and got into the car, I followed now that I reckoned it was safe. He licked his finger and marked an imaginary '1' in the air then pointed to himself. Dork.
Dean scowled at him. "That's all you got? Weak. That is bush league."
Dean had indeed spent his evening in the local watering hole, Sam had checked the HellHoundsLair site before joining him and confirmed that the story had been revealed as a hoax.
I spent the evening attempting to find a comfortable position to lay on a motel bed. Finally concluding around the time my brothers returned that there simply wasn't one. Dean seemed to sense that I was having a rough time and settled himself into the bed next to me, offering a hug and ignoring the fact that Sam's bag had previously been placed at the foot of this bed. I curled gratefully into his side, finally being able to take the pressure of the still healing cut just under my ribcage. Don't get me wrong, Sam gives awesome hugs, but Dean is just better at cuddles.
It was the next morning when we drifted into the local breakfast joint that we first heard about it. The gossipy older lady at the counter spent a good five minutes discussing the death of a local girl with the table behind us. She'd gone to the 'Hell House' on a dare and hadn't come back out, her friends had heard screaming and had eventually called the police.
A cop had discovered the body hanging from the joists in the cellar in the early hours of the morning. They were saying that she had hung herself.
The boys dropped me off in the local library before heading over to the Murdock house. It would probably still be crawling with cops anyway and I figured it was time to hit the books again.
The only problem being that I wasn't really sure what I was looking for. We'd already researched the Murdock family and concluded that there wasn't really anything there that would be likely to cause a vengeful spirit. Sam had made a pretty good start on a family tree, I spent a while in the records office, fleshing out the family tree with more details, extended family, dates, etc.
The house had been built by James Murdock in the early years of the 20th century, I wasn't able to find an exact date. James Murdock had become fond of the bottle after his wife passed in labour, taking their second child with her. He'd died in 1923, a surly and unpleasant man by all accounts, the death certificate listed the cause of death as "Drunken sickness".
His son Martin Murdock who'd lived there in the 30's had died after a prolonged illness, his wife has passed quietly in her sleep not long after him. He wasn't the last inhabitant of the house; one of his sons moved away and had passed recently in a care home, his own family all still alive. The other, Edward, had inherited the house but hadn't returned from fighting in WWII and the house had lain empty ever since.
While it was possible that a violent death in battle could result in a ghost lingering in this world, they generally haunt near the places they had died, and Edward Murdock had died in Europe. Ghosts can also be attached to objects of course, like Bloody Mary and her mirror, in which case burning the house to the ground was probably the easiest course of action, as we had no idea what the object might be.
The other possibility was James Murdock's wife Lilly. There was no mention in the records of the gender of the child she'd died birthing, but if it was a girl it might explain the ghost's dislike of females. Death in childbirth may well be traumatic enough to result in a ghost, though it's certainly not common.
There was no local history of any hauntings in that house that dated back further than a few months. They all claimed to be much older of course, but if that were true then no one had written anything about it anywhere I could find. A chat with the librarian, (who thought that local history was a fascinating subject to be writing a paper on) confirmed that no one seems to have heard of Mordechai Murdock before the incident with the local kids a couple of months ago.
There were no recorded incidents, other than the kids getting pranked (I'm still 90% sure that's all that was) and the girl's death last night.
The boys met me for lunch in a different diner. The one we'd had breakfast at had failed to produce decent bacon, and you can't have a bacon cheese burger without decent bacon. I filled them in on what I'd learned and they reported that the girl's body had been carted away, but the police presence was still strong at the house. They hadn't been able to get close to it yet to investigate further.
We headed back to the motel after lunch to get the better WiFi and debate without drawing unwanted attention. Sam and I were hovering over his laptop, browsing what HellHoundsLair had to say about the death.
There were a whole bunch of photos of the inside of the house, which mostly just looked like a bad horror movie set to be honest. There was also some theorising that while they stood by the decorations being a hoax, perhaps the ghost was real.
I leant back from the laptop and sighed, "I guess we're just going to have to head back to the house tonight and check again."
"You're not going." Dean informed me from where he was checking our stock of salt rounds.
"I'm not?" I raised both eyebrows at him.
"No," He started packing the rounds away and pulling out shotguns and cleaning kits. "This guy goes after girls, assuming he's real, you're not going in there while you're still injured."
I bristled, but couldn't argue; the boy had a good point.
The boys had gone hunting without me once night fell. They returned sour-faced, cold and without anything to report.
The HellHoundsLair guys had been there, and had provided a good distraction for the cops who were standing guard. Once inside the house the guys had taken a quick look around the ground floor, then headed down to the cellar, where the hanging had occurred. All they'd found was a rat in the bottom of a cupboard, no signs of any ghosts. Dean's not a big fan of rats.
They'd made it in and out before the cops had returned from chasing the 'professionals' and had watched from a distance as the cops caught them doubling back to sneak into the house. Seeing the cops rough-handling the two idiots had at least improved Dean's mood.
I had spent the evening looking up the meaning of the symbols painted in the house, the photos on HellHoundsLair proving useful, even if the guys running the site were otherwise a pain in the proverbial. Most were things that popular culture sees as satanic; pentagrams, inverse crosses, band logos and the like.
There were a few that were less mainstream and were actually legit, and I'd dug up some information on them and the cultures they derived from, but hadn't made any significant headway. We all went to bed frustrated and didn't sleep well.
I tossed and turned and could feel Dean's irritation rising, though he'd never say anything. I tried to lay still, I really did. Eventually I switched to Sam's bed and stole one of his pillows, I curled around it and listened to the boys' breathing slow into the deep calm breaths of sleep. It was a long and uncomfortable night for me. The thoughts of different symbols rolling around my head.
One was a Tibetan Spirit Sigil, used to focus thought as a meditation aide. I pictured the symbol in my mind, the rough paint job on the uneven boards of the wall of the Murdock House coming easily into my mind's eye. I focused on pretending my leg wasn't throbbing and the stitches were tugging at my side with every breath.
I don't know when I eventually drifted into sleep, but my dreams were filled with ropes hanging from rafters and distant screams.
The next morning I was woken by Sam getting up to take a shower. Once the door had shut behind him Dean fetched a small foil bag from his duffel and, raising a finger to his lips to indicate that I should stay quiet, rifled through the clothes Sam had left at the foot of the bed. He poured a white powder into Sam's underwear before carefully folding the foil packet up and hiding it back in his bag
"Dean? Is that-?" He held a finger to his lips again, though I'd kept my voice low. "In his underwear? That's evil. You know that stuff basically gives a minor chemical burn to your skin, right? How would you like to have a chemical burn on your todger?"
Dean blanched slightly and his hands moved to cover the delicate area, but then Sam emerged from the bathroom. Dean chose not to say anything and I maintained my policy of not interfering.
We settled for breakfast in our new favourite dinner (the bacon here was excellent!) and discussed the empty house again. We were leaning towards the theory that the ghost hadn't appeared because there were no girls for it to murder. Sam kept shifting uncomfortably in his seat.
The fact that the police guard would likely last a while yet limited our ability to test our theory. Not to mention Dean's continued reluctance to allow me near the house again.
The bit that troubled me was that the original story had been made up. I'm still certain that the first girl to be seen hanging in the basement was Dana. After much debate we finally decided to go and visit Craig Thurston again and get the truth from him this time.
"Man, I think I'm allergic to our soap." Sam commented as we got up to leave.
Dean walked away laughing.
Sam froze, staring after him. "This was you? You're a friggin' jerk!"
Dean offered no rebuttal and we decided to return to the motel, so Sam could take another shower.
Craig looked a bit down when we entered the store, leaning against his counter and hanging his head. He glanced up as the bell over the door rang and then pushed himself away from the counter and headed towards the back of the store.
"Hey Craig? Remember us?" Dean greeted him.
"Guys, look I'm really not in the mood to answer any of your questions, okay?"
"Oh, don't worry. We're just here to buy an album, that's all." He flicked through the B section of the records before plucking out the same Blue Öyster Cult album I'd been looking at a couple of days before, "Tell me Craig, you, uh, you into BOC? Or just scaring the hell outta people? Now why don't you tell us about that house, without lying through your ass this time."
Craig glanced down at the album with wide eyes before looking at each of us in turn, his gaze settle on me, clearly puzzled, but I just raised an eyebrow in question. The same look I've been using on my brothers whenever they'd done something they shouldn't've when they were kids.
"All right, um. My cousin, Dana, was on break from TCU. Ah, I guess we were just bored, looking for something to do. So I showed her this abandoned dump I found. We thought it would be funny if we made it look like it was haunted. So we painted symbols on the walls, some from some albums, some from some of Dana's theology textbooks. Then we found out this guy Murdock used to live there so we ...we made up some story to go along with that. So they told people, who told other people. And then these two guys put it on their stupid website. Everything just took on a life of its own. I mean I, I thought it was funny at first but... now that girl's dead! It was just a joke, you know. I mean, none of it was real, we made the whole thing up. I swear!" The kid almost had tears in his eyes by the time he'd finished. Most of this we'd already figured out, but one thing had caught my attention: "took on a life of its own." What if...
We left the store without offering the kid any false platitudes. Dean turned to us as we passed through the doorway, "If none of it was real how the hell do you explain Mordechai?"
"It took on a life of its own." I echoed, "Sam, do you remember that book we read about Tibetan monks? The golem they created once?"
Sam's brow crinkled in thought, "Yeah, there was an incident in 1915. They all focused on a spirit sigil and created a Tulpa."
"Tulpa?" Dean questioned.
"Yes, a Tibetan thought form that-"
"Yeah, I know what a Tulpa is. I thought they are purely theoretical. You saying Mordechai is only real because people believe in him?"
"It's possible." I shrugged at him, "It would explain why he only appeared recently and why we can't track down a real person to have been Mordechai."
"If that works does that mean Santa's real? How come I'm not getting hooked up every Christmas?"
"Because you're a bad person." Sam deadpanned as we got into the car.
"20 monks managed to create a Tulpa with focused meditation and a spirit sigil, a symbol which was painted in the Murdock house and is used for focusing thoughts. Imagine was 10,000 web surfers could do, all looking at a photo of that symbol and thinking about a ghost."
"Okay, so we just remove the symbol and he fades away, right?"
"Unfortunately it's not that simple." Sam explained, "You see, once Tulpas are created they take on a life of their own."
"Great. So if he really is a thought form how the hell are we supposed to kill an idea?" Dean pulled the car away from the curb.
"Well, it's not gonna be easy with these guys helping us." Sam had somehow managed to get enough WiFi to load the HellHoundsLair site and was browsing the gallery photos again.
Dean glanced at the screen thoughtfully, "Hmm, I got an idea. Come on."
"Where we going?" I asked, "and are we not even gonna question how in the hell Sam's got WiFi in a moving car?"
"I'm magic." Sam told me, smug little grin on his face.
The sun was shining as we pulled up to the trailer park, and I squinted against the light glinting off the silver coloured trailer that the guy at the gate had pointed us towards.
"Well, it's a step up from mum's basement." I muttered drily.
Dean snorted and Sam shook his head at me. "Remember, we're gonna-"
"We know, Sam!" Dean interrupted him.
I tuned out their bickering to listen for sounds from the trailer in front of me. Professional 1 and Professional 2 were both inside. There seemed to be a pep talk about how finding a real ghost would be their "ticket to the big time right here. Fame, money, sex. With girls." I laughed at that, these two idiots wouldn't know what to do with a real life girl. I put a stop to the talking both inside and outside the trailer by banging on the door.
There was a squeal from inside and a hushed, "Who is it?"
"Come on out here guys, we hear you in there." I took a couple of steps back from the door. And leaned heavily on my crutch as the door swung open and the Professionals stuck their heads through the gap.
"Ah, would you look at that!" Dean mocked, "Action figures in their original packaging - what a shock."
"Guys, we need to talk."
"Yeah, um, sorry guys. We're ahhh, a little bit busy right now." Professional 1 fumbled.
"Okay, well we'll make it quick." Dean had switched to business-like and straight to the point, "We need you to shut down your website."
Professional 1 scoffed, "Man, you know, these guys got us busted last night, spent the night in a holding cell..."
"I had to pee in that cell urinal." Whined Professional 2, "In front of people. And I get stage fright."
"Why should we trust you guys?" Professional 1 finished.
"Your ghost?" I was sick of this BS and my tone wasn't overly friendly. "Isn't a ghost, he's a Tulpa. They're a type of thought form that is brought into existence by people believing that they are real, kinda like the opposite of fairies in Peter Pan dying if you don't believe. Your website has generated sufficient believers to create a homicidal ghost and result in a death." I paused to let my next words sink in. "Your website is responsible for killing that girl."
"Ali!" Sam whispered behind me. I was going way off script.
Professional 2 looked horrified, but Professional 1 scoffed at me, "You expect us to believe that we magically created a ghost?"
"You believe in ghosts, but not the power of thought? Which has been the subject of many more legitimate and endorsed scientific studies than the paranormal has?" I raised an eyebrow and watched as he gold-fished, trying to come up with a comeback. "Good news, is that while ideas cannot be killed they can be changed. Which means that we can change the legend you've brought to life into something that we can actually kill."
Dean, who had always been better at improv than Sam had, held up the death certificate we'd falsified. "This is a death certificate for one Mordechai Murdock. Stating that he died of a self inflicted gunshot wound. You upload this to your website, along with a story saying that he's retained a fear of firearms, and will die if shot with a .45 loaded with special iron rounds."
"Then we go ghost hunting, you guys get to see your first 'ghost'," I added finger quotes for effect, "we shoot the bastard, and then you shutdown that section of your website so he doesn't get recreated. We go find a real ghost story for you to publish instead and you don't mess with Tibetan Spirit Sigils again. That's the symbol that gave this story power in the first place."
Professional 1 had a calculating look on his face, "Can you get us video footage of a real, live ghost?"
I tilted my head to the side, "You wanna re-define that one?"
He rolled his eyes at me, "You know what I mean."
"On the condition that you follow the plan on this one and close the book on Mordechai, I personally guarantee you video footage of a real, dead ghost."
"Hang on," Dean grabbed my arm, "We're not spending any more time with these douches than needed, this was not the plan!"
"Then I'll go with them and call you to come get me when the job's done."
"You are not going hunting with just these two dipshits for backup! Not after what happened to you last time."
"I'm not going to take them after a Deava, Dean! I'll find a nice simple haunting, beginner level stuff for them! The kind of shit you've been doing from the age of 12."
"What's a diva?" Professional 1 asked. "And beginner level? Do I need to remind you that we're professional paranormal investigators? We don't need coddling."
I pulled my shirt up to reveal the bandages that hadn't been changed yet. The blood could just about been seen through the dressing. "Shadow demons with claws, nasty sons of bitches." Professional 2 went white as a sheet. He also kept his eyes focused on my midriff, even after I pulled my shirt back into place. "The closest you've come to seeing a ghost is a vase that fell by itself. Next step from there is spotting Casper the friendly ghost. Unless you want to borrow my crutches after I'm done with them?"
"Counter offer." Sam cut in. "You guys close your website down we all go our merry ways and no one else has to die over this."
It was delivered in a deadpan voice. Sam is a big guy and he can be very intimidating when he wants to be. Professional 2 tore his eyes away from somewhere south of my neck and whimpered slightly staring up at Sam.
Professional 1 gulped and turned to me, "Casper sounds fantastic. We'll get this death certificate uploaded, what was the story again?"
The boys and I were gathered in a booth in a small cafe in town. The décor was somewhat eclectic, but the WiFi was solid and the food cheap. Dean reached up and pulled the string dangling from a model fisherman with a large fish mounted on a board on the wall above our table.
The fisherman's mouth moved up and down and an irritating laugh played. It reminded me of the Riddler's recorded laugh from Batman Forever.
Sam reached up and pulled the string, stopping the noise. "If you pull that string one more time I'm gonna kill you."
Dean looked Sam dead in the eye and pulled the string again. Sam immediately pulled it again and glared at Dean, who just laughed, "Come on man, you need more laughter in your life. You know you're way too tense."
"They post it yet?" I changed the subject, hopefully distracting Dean from that bloody fisherman!
Sam spun his laptop around and we both leaned forward. Dean read aloud, "We've learned from reputable sources that Mordechai Murdock has a fatal fear of firearms. All right. How long do we wait?"
"Long enough for the new story to spread, and the legend to change. I figure by nightfall iron rounds will work on the sucker." Sam grabbed his beer holding it up in a toast.
Dean lifted his bottle and clinked it against Sam's, taking a drink. Sam started to grin. I turned to watch Dean's face; just because I don't participate in the prank wars doesn't mean they're not good spectator sport. The confusion on Dean's face after he tried and failed to put the bottle down was gold. Followed by the dawning realisation, "You didn't."
Sam was outright laughing now, his eye's alight with mirth and a tube of superglue in his hand. "Oh, I did!"
Dean started shaking his hand, reminding me of a cat with something stuck to its paw. Sam pulled the string to make the fisherman laugh again and I leant forward, pulling Dean's hand towards me and pouring table vinegar over it.
"Hey, what are you doing?"
"The vinegar will help to dissolve the glue. Try not to pull, you might tear the skin."
Sam laughed even harder at the look on Dean's face.
That god-awful fisherman got hung up in a tree a good distance from the hell house and about 4 meters off the ground. Then we pulled the string and circled around to the house, giving the cops time to go and investigate the noise. The height had been my idea, the fisherman would keep laughing until you pulled the string to turn him off, or the batteries died, but people rarely look up, so sticking him up a tree should give us a bit more time.
Sam and Dean snuck inside while I stayed outside as a lookout. Not a role I was happy in, but currently the best option for me.
"I barely have any skin left on my palm." I could just hear Dean's voice still complaining inside the house. I just sighed, I had told him not to pull on the skin.
"I'm not touching that line with a ten foot pole." Sam replied and I snickered.
"Hey, are we late?" The professionals had been 'sneaking' up from my right for a while.
"Right on time," I gestured to the house behind me, "go on in."
Foot steps thudded up the steps behind me as the two lads totted their camera gear and ridiculous goggles into the house.
"So you think old Mordechai's home?" I heard Dean mutter from inside.
"I don't know."
"Me either. WHOA! WHOA!"
Alarm sounded in the voices, but wasn't strong enough for the scent to reach me where I stood outside.
"What are you trying to do, get yourself killed?" Sam's voice sounded irritated and I smirked, the professionals hadn't sound very quiet to me, but apparently had been able to sneak up on my brothers.
"We're just trying to get a book and movie deal, okay?"
"Besides, the deal was that we'd get to see a ghost!"
"So you picked one that's homicidal? Real smart-guys, aren't you?"
The sound of knives being sharpened reached my ears, and I backed up towards the house, struggling a little with the front steps.
"Ah guys, you wanna ... you wanna open that door for us?" The scent of fear from the professionals was starting to reach me where I stood outside.
"Why don't you?" Dean's voice was far steadier than Ed's had been.
The sound of a door bursting open drew my attention from the surrounding woods firmly onto the house behind me. The ghost roared and there was a series of gunshots.
Why where there so many shots? It's not like my brothers to waste rounds, either by missing, or shooting something that's dead. Was it not working?
"Did you get him?" Harry's voice could be heard over the sounds of footsteps. I could recognise the steps of each of my brothers, hastily checking other rooms in the house.
"Yeah they got him." Ed's voice was shaking worse than before.
"No, on camera, did you get him on camera." Harry demanded "Let me see it, let me see it."
There was another roar and a burst of fear, before a thud of a body hitting the ground and scrambling backwards.
"Hey! Didn't you guys post that B.S. story we gave you?"
"Of course we did."
"But then our server crashed."
"So it didn't take?" That's it, I'm going in there. "So these, these guns don't work. Great. Sam, any ideas?"
"We are getting outta here." First bright idea either of those two have had.
The ghost materialised in front of me as I entered the house, a huge hulk of a man with a wide brimmed hat, a sneer on his face and a rope in his hand.
"Well, howdy sunshine!" I pulled a silver knife from my bag, adrenaline starting to shoot through me.
Mordechai roared and lunged towards me, I darted to the side, dropping my crutch. Usually against such a large opponent my advantage would be in speed and dexterity, but now, hampered by my injuries, I stumbled and fell.
Mordechai grabbed my ankle and pulled me towards him, brandishing the rope in his other hand. Harry and Ed rushed passed, heading for the door. I lashed out with my silver knife, but Mordechai's leg vanished to mist as the blade made contact.
Ed was suddenly grabbing my hand and pulling me to my feet, his eyes wide and his palm sweaty. "Get outside!" I shouted at him, surprised that he would be such a gentleman. Gentleman or not, I still don't want civilians getting mixed up in a fight.
"Yeah. Come on, Ed!" Harry was waiting at the door, and I pushed Ed after him.
I returned the silver knife to my bag and pulled out two more, one iron and one bronze. Typically bronze is most effective against old gods, but given silver had been largely ignored I was willing to give it a try.
"What the hell are you doing in here?" Sam stormed towards me. I pushed him at the door too, before slicing at the ghost who'd materialised behind him with the bronze knife.
The blade passed through him as the silver had, but he didn't disappear this time and the rope was brought down over my head. I darted forwards, now using the iron blade to no great effect, but managing to free myself from the rope.
"HEY! Come and get it you ugly son of a bitch." Sam shouted, joining the scuffle until Mordechai pinned him to the wall next to the door, rope held taught across his throat.
I swapped out the bronze and iron knives for brass and copper, getting no more reaction from the Tulpa from these than I had iron or bronze. I pulled the silver knife again and stabbed it into the side of Mordechai's head.
He disintegrated and I grabbed Sam and my crutch, heading for the door as Dean joined us.
"Mordechai can't leave the house, we can't kill him - We improvise." Dean help up a lighter, flicked it and threw it back into the house. Flames bloomed as the lighter hit one of the puddles of kerosene Dean had spread about the place.
The heat washed over us like a wave and we staggered a bit further away, Sam coughing and holding his throat. "That's your solution? Burn the whole damn place to the ground?"
"Well, nobody will go in anymore." Dean justified, "I mean look, Mordechai can't haunt a house if there's no house to haunt. It's fast and dirty but it works."
"Well, what if the legend changes again?" Sam asked, "and Mordechai is allowed to leave the house?"
"Well," Dean clearly hadn't thought about that, "Well, then we'll just have to come back."
We took cover behind some nearby bushes in case the police returned. The gunshots would certainly have gained their attention, and they were no doubt on their way. "Kinda makes you wonder," Sam mused, "Of all the thing we hunted, how many existed just cuz people believed in them."
The sun was shining the next day and I watched with my brothers from the shade, as the professionals ran around in a flurry of activity and inefficiency. I don't know if I burn so easily because I'm a prangeni, or if I'm just pale, but the sun is not my friend, so I was holding an umbrella over my shoulder as a parasol. We had packed up and checked out of the motel that morning and were now at the caravan park, staying out of the professionals' way as they hastily packed up their pitch. They were stacking bags on top of the car, rather than into the caravan, which seemed to be a more sensible place if you asked me. I swatted idly at a fly as they struggled to strap a pink flamingo lawn ornament to the ramshackle heap.
"Do you think they have any understanding of aerodynamics?" Sam asked, eyeing the growing load.
"Or gravity?" I added, listening to the creaking of the poor old car's suspension.
Dean huffed and stood from where he had been leaning against a picnic table. Hands in pockets he slouched away. Sam peered after him, "Where's he going?"
"To get food, you don't hear his stomach grumbling?"
Sam gave me bitchface #8, 'No, of course I can't hear that with my normal, human hearing.'
"So, Sammy, you got a hunt for me?"
He gave me bitchface #2, 'Are you crazy? No, of course I haven't!', "Do you actually want to go hunting with these clowns?" He gestured to where Harry was trying to open the boot of the car. The load on the roof seemed to be preventing it from swinging open, but Harry couldn't seem to see why it wouldn't open and was just pulling on the boot lid. We watched for a few minutes more. "Should we tell him?" Sam asked drily.
"Nah, we've got to let him figure it out himself or he'll never learn." I glanced at my watch, "Besides, I want to time how long it takes him."
Sam snorted and dropped his head, allowing his hair to droop into his eyes. "You're kind of sadistic sometimes, Ali."
"I know, I used to time you when you were doing your maths homework too."
He looked up at me sharply, "You..." I burst out laughing. "You little brat!" He reached out and used his ridiculously long gangly arm to try and push me off the end of the bench.
After we settled, and after Harry had opened the boot of the car (4 min and 23 seconds), I asked Sam again about a hunt. He rolled his eyes and pushed his laptop towards me. I don't know how that thing had internet, but I didn't complain. I started browsing local news websites, going back over the past year or so for anything that might be a haunting. Not much in Richmondson, Texas, so I started looking further afield and gratefully accepted a kids meal of chicken nuggets and chips when Dean returned. Paying attention to the free toy only so far to ensure I bounced it off the back of Dean's head when he wasn't looking.
It actually landed in the bin, not something I'd been attempting and certainly not something I'd be able to replicate if asked to, but Sam found it highly entertaining, and I played it off as having done it on purpose. Dean was either reluctantly impressed, or just didn't want to fetch the toy from the bin, but he didn't return fire. He chose to attack my idea of taking the professionals on a hunt instead and we argued about that for the rest of our meal.
The professionals seemed to have collected the final boxes of their stuff around the same time we finished eating, so we binned the rubbish and wandered towards them.
"I was thinking that Mordechai has a really super high attack bonus." Harry was saying.
"Man I got the munchies right now." I rolled my eyes, pot again, Ed? "Gentlemen, lady."
Sam offered a verbal greeting and Harry turned to Ed, "Should we tell 'em?"
"Hey, might as well, you know, they're going to read about it in the trades." We don't read the trades, never any potential hunts there.
"So this morning we got a phone call from a very important Hollywood producer." Harry told us, almost buzzing with excitement.
"Oh yeah, wrong number?" Dean questioned, I snorted slightly.
"No, smart-ass." Snapped Ed, "He read all about the Hell House on our website and wants to option the motion picture rights. Maybe even have us write it."
"And create the RPG." Harry added as he placed the final load into the car.
"The what?" Dean questioned.
"Role playing game."
"Right."
"A little lingo for you." Ed offered, "Anyhoo, ahhh, excuse us, we're off to la-la land."
"Well congratulations guys. That sounds really great." Sam was grinning in a way that was a little too sincere for his interactions with these clowns.
"Yeah." Dean added, "That's awesome, best of luck to you."
"Oh yeah, luck. That has nothing to do with it. It's about talent." Ed announced, "Sheer unabashed talent."
We all nodded awkwardly.
The got into their poor overworked little car and drove away. Dean shaking his head in amazement as they went.
"I have a confession to make." Announced Sam.
"What's that?"
"I, uh..." He scratched the back of his neck, "I was the one that called them and told them I was a producer."
Dean barked out a laugh, "Yeah? Well I'm the one who put the dead fish in their back seat."
Sam treated us to one of his genuine laughs, the kind that crinkles his eyes up and makes him look like a happy Labrador puppy. "Truce?" He offered, glancing at Dean.
"Yeah truce. At least for the next 100 miles."
