Gary Boot fidgeted as he waited in the carefully measured-out circle of salt. The two men had insisted that he would be safe there while they took care of the poltergeist (the poltergeist, for crying out loud) that was currently making his family home uninhabitable. After their first examination of the house, they had dismissed the root cause as a ghost (ghost!) and upgraded it (or downgraded it) to poltergeist. According to the brothers, a poltergeist was more dangerous but less research. It seemed like they'd been inside the house for a very long time, and it was starting to make him worry. Heaven knew what his priest would say if something happened to the helpers the Church had arranged for his little problem.
The sun was edging toward the horizon by the time the pair emerged from the house, the taller one limping a little. As they neared their car, he could see the beginning of a black eye on the other one.
"Everything went . . .well?" Gary wasn't exactly sure how to ask the question.
"Should be ok. We'll come back later tonight or tomorrow, just to make sure. I'd stay out of the house after dark, just to be on the safe side." The tall one tossed a duffel bag into the trunk and turned to Gary. "It, um, kind of made a mess in there."
"Tossed some dishes and books around," the other one added helpfully. "Put up more of a fuss than we were expecting, so we're being extra cautious." He climbed into the drivers' side of the old car with no further words, and the tall one shrugged a half-hearted, one-shoulder apology and followed his companion into the car. Gary watched them go. He gave his childhood home one last glance before edging out of the salt circle and walking to his car. He wasn't sure how he was going to explain this to his wife.
xxx
"We're going to have to do some research, Dean. That thing was stronger than it should have been. We need to check the history of the land."
"Joy," Dean muttered.
Sam rolled his shoulder experimentally, wincing at the already stiffening muscles. He'd been tossed into a wall, and his body did not like it. "It's just as well," he said, unzipping the duffel bag that he'd fished out of the backseat and digging around for the painkillers. "Joan needed another day or two away from the road, and we need some down-time to recover from this case."
Dean grunted as he concentrated on the trail that had been optimistically named a driveway. It wasn't anything the Impala couldn't handle, but Dean hated putting his baby through this much of a workout. They were in four-wheel drive country, and the classic Chevy could fake it admirably but she wasn't truly designed for off-roading. "A few days without your wife yacking her guts out would be nice," he admitted, wincing as they drove through a shallow creek bed.
Sam didn't bother to glare at his brother for the crude comment. He knew Dean was just as worried about Joan as he was. The car bounced out onto a tar-and-chip road after about a mile, and they both relaxed fractionally. "Any theories about what could cause something like that?"
"A weakening of the veil, maybe?" Dean reached up and gingerly touched the edge of the blossoming bruise around his eye. "Might want to call the wizard and ask him about it. Sounds like this kind of thing is right up his alley."
Sam grimaced. Dresden wasn't one of his favorite people, mostly because of that time one of the man's cases had resulted in Dean spending three days in the hospital and then months in rehabilitation recovering from a vampire attack, but he was one of their better resources when it came to knowledge of this type. "Let's try Bobby first," he suggested.
His brother shrugged and slid a tape into the deck. They spent the rest of the drive into town debating the merits of different superheroes and complaining about each other's music, not discussing the case by mutual unspoken agreement. It was better to wait until they could get some semblance of an idea for what this meant.
Billy was fast asleep for his afternoon nap and Joan was sorting through laundry when they got back to the motel, but she stopped with a sigh when the two of them came in and dragged out the first aid kit. "Let me guess, it put up a little more of a fight than you expected."
"A little stronger than your usual poltergeist," Sam said. "We'll need to do more research."
"You need to sit down and get off that ankle, and Dean needs to put an icepack on his eye before it swells shut," she said, pulling out a handful of freezer bags from the kit and kneeling down to grab the ice bucket from the corner. It had been in the way earlier in Sam's quest to spread out his research, but now that would have to take a back seat. Joan stood up a little more carefully, using the dresser for balance with her free hand, and headed for the door. Sam held it open from his seat on one of the room's rickety chairs and watched as she made her way towards the ice machine. It was next to the manager's office and should theoretically be safe, but these days he worried when she was out of his line of sight.
Her hands were full when she came back, but she took care of that fairly quickly, handing the bucket to Dean and the bags to Sam. "Dean's eye, your ankle. What else?"
"My shoulder met the wall pretty hard, but I should be fine with some Tiger Balm. Dean?"
His brother shook his head as he scooped ice out into the bag that Sam was holding open. "I think Sam took the worst of it, this time. Something up there didn't like him."
Joan took the first bag of ice from Sam and sealed it up. She wrapped it in a strip of flannel that used to be one of Sam's favorite shirts before it lost a battle with a barbed-wire fence before repeating the process on the second bag. Dean took the first one, pressing it against his eye and leaning back until he was lying on the bed, and Sam propped his left leg up on the second chair, arranging the second flannel-wrapped ice pack around his ankle while Joan dumped what little ice remained down the sink in the bathroom.
When she came back into the room, she went to Sam rather than back to the laundry, stepping in close and running her fingers through his hair. Sam looked up and smiled. "Everything's all right here?"
"I was thinking of taking a nap before you came in. It might be a good idea for all of us, given the damage you two took at the house. Dean's already halfway out, judging by his breathing."
"You two leave me out of this," Dean said, not stirring from his prone position on the bed.
Sam shook his head. "There's too much work to do. We missed something in the research. That thing was much stronger than any run-of-the-mill poltergeist."
"Sam, it can wait. No one's in danger right now, right?"
"We told the owner to stay away until we'd done a little more work."
"Then you are going to lay down and take a nap. I'll even handle the Tiger Balm beforehand so that Dean doesn't have to get up, and you know how much I hate getting that stuff on my hands."
The two of them had come to an understanding back when he was still working on his undergraduate degree, with the simple compromise that if Joan asked him to rest and no one was in danger Sam would do so for at least an hour, so Sam stood up and limped over to the bed, dropping onto it with an alarmingly loud squeak of the springs and pulling off both layers of shirts in one motion. Joan went to work on his right shoulder, leaning her weight into the heel of her hand to help loosen the muscles there, and afterward she rearranged the ice pack on his ankle and curled into his left side, tucked under his arm with a blanket tossed over the two of them. His hand came up to rest against the swell of her belly. "You're really all right?" he asked quietly.
"I'm pregnant, Sam, not helpless," she sighed. It was a familiar phrase by now, since they'd had a hard time not treating her much more delicately than normal. "I'm being careful, I promise. I'm just tired. You try carrying around your giant offspring while riding herd on a toddler."
"It looks like we'll be staying here for a little while longer while we research. Dean's not sure we've taken care of the problem and he's right. We might need to take you up, see what you can tell about it."
"Tomorrow, maybe," Joan said, the words garbled around a yawn. "Today we're taking naps and getting dinner and then you two can do research."
It seemed like a good plan. Sam closed his eyes and relaxed.
Billy was the one who woke them up, chatting up a storm when he woke up from his nap, climbed down from his cot and started playing with his toys. Joan started a pot of chicken soup on the two-burner range and used the second burner for grilled cheese sandwiches while Dean started digging into the local history and Sam went over the specific history of the house. The house had been built in 1923 by James Boot, Gary Boot's grandfather, and had stayed in the family the entire time. Until his elderly parents were apparently pushed down the stairs by a poltergeist five years ago, nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the house or on the property.
Dean was running into similar dead ends. There were a few, very old rumors that something bad had happened out in the caves in the area, but nothing solid and no specifics beyond that. He'd put in a call to Bobby Singer about the possibility of cursed building materials, but other than that he was out of ideas. Tomorrow when they took Joan out so she could look things over he would walk the property a little with his EMF meter, see if he couldn't pinpoint the problem.
The next morning they waited until it was likely to be full daylight even in the shadows of the hills before driving back up to the house. "I'm not sure what you think I'm going to be able to do," Joan said as she maneuvered her way out of the back of the car. "You both know I'm a psychic null zone for most things."
"Maybe there's a ghost who's having a hard time manifesting, and that's what's attracting the poltergeist. You know we haven't found anything concrete that should account for anything like that poltergeist."
"Meanwhile I am going to walk the property with an EMF meter, see if I can't find the source of the problem."
The house should have been perfectly safe, but Sam went in with the second EMF meter and did a walk-through first before escorting his wife and child inside. She moved through the first floor carefully, Billy on one hip so that Sam could stand guard behind them with the shotgun. There was too much broken glass to allow him to walk around right now. "I'm not seeing anything in the house right now," she said. "No one hiding away down here. Is there a basement?"
"Just a crawl space. Bedrock is too close to the surface for a basement. You'd have to make one with hammers and chisels to get enough space."
"That just leaves upstairs." This part was going to be a little more dicey. Joan was absolutely not supposed to be carrying Billy up any stairs. Her center of gravity was so shifted that her balance was off as it was and adding stairs wouldn't make it easier. They were hoping that the shotgun was just a precaution as she traded Billy for it. The stairs creaked a little, but nothing alarming, and Joan went through the cool bedrooms carefully, one by one, checking in closets and awkwardly getting down to look under the two beds that were still there. Sam helped her up both times, his shoulders tense given how much the poltergeist had thrown him around yesterday. She handed Sam the shotgun and settling down on the floor with Billy in the biggest room. If it was curious or shy, babies were a universal icebreaker. Billy handled his part like a champ, sitting across from his mother and chatting up a storm about what he was going to build with his blocks when they were back at the motel.
"Nothing," she said after a while. "If there was something here that attracted the poltergeist, its not in the house now." She rolled to her side, got to her knees, and pushed up from there. "The house feels kind of lonely, though. Abandoned homes always make me a little sad."
"Want to walk around outside, see if you can't find something?"
Joan shrugged. "Can't hurt to check." She rubbed at the small of her back, grimacing. "You're going to have to carry Billy, though. He and I are both getting too big for that."
They headed back downstairs, one step at a time so Joan could carry the shotgun with both hands and headed out into the fall sunshine. They set out from the house in a spiral, finding the lightly marked property line on the east quickly. The house was set about a third of the way in the boundaries from the north and east on a long, skinny piece of property.
Billy wanted to walk so they let him as they went through the scrub and into the woods that mostly made up their surroundings. Sam kept the shotgun at his side, not quite at the ready but not far from it, as they walked. Both adults kept a wary eye out for snakes. Joan turned to look at a small rock formation and froze. "Oh."
Sam realized that she'd stopped after a couple of steps and turned back around. She waved him back and turned to something that he couldn't see. "It's been a while," she said.
The ghost that she was see evidently spoke to her, and Joan smiled and flushed, her hands coming down to cradle her belly. "Yes, I'm excited. And scared, a little, that I'll mess things up for him. Sam and I decided to name him after our friend Michael and his brother Dean. What brings you all the way out here?"
Sam did his best to follow the half of the conversation that he could hear. This part was at least moderately familiar, his wife speaking to a ghost that he couldn't perceive, and he could understand why her completely normal father had reacted badly to it. To someone who didn't believe, it probably looked like the sign of a mental illness. Joan had developed a few ways to keep people from realizing what she was doing, but sometimes she didn't know she was talking to a spirit unless she recognized them.
The look on her face was full of deep concentration as she took in everything that the ghost was saying. "Let me repeat that back for Sam," she said, before turning to him. "Judith says that you chased off the poltergeist, but that the veil between the living and the dead is permanently damaged off toward the south end. She says you'll know it when you feel it." Joan looked back to the ghost that he couldn't see, her eyes following it as it moved around. "There will always be a weak spot where spirits can cross back and forth more easily."
"And there's nothing that can be done about it?"
"No," Joan said after a moment. "Eventually time will make that go away, but its going to be a few more generations before that happens." She bit her lip. "Whatever happened here, it was really bad. Judith doesn't want to talk about it."
Sam nodded, turning to where Billy was toddling around picking up rocks and putting them in his pockets. He scooped up the toddler, accepting the last few rocks and putting them in his own pocket. There wasn't any sign that he could see the ghost either, which made life a little bit easier. It was hard enough on Joan sometimes. "Guess when we get back, we'll be calling Mr. Boot to let him know what we know."
He looked over at Joan and shuddered just a bit when he saw her embracing an invisible figure. He couldn't understand how Joan could do that since just the idea of touching a spirit sent shivers down his spine. She stepped back and dropped her arms, nodding and giving a small wave, before walking back to his side. "Billy and I will wait for you at the car," she said. There were tear tracks on her cheeks. "Go get your brother."
Sam put his son down and the kid immediately toddled over to his mother, who grabbed his hand and started walking back in the direction of the house. It was clear she wanted the chance to put herself back together a little, so he headed in the same direction that his brother had taken.
About a mile from the house Sam stopped abruptly, feeling his skin crawl. Dean was there almost instantly. "I can't get much closer either," he said, his voice low. "Whatever happened, it was bad. Slaughter of innocents or similar."
Sam filled him in on what had happened at the house and with Joan, and Dean shook his head. "Well, as long as no one tries to develop this part of the land it should be all right. If I remember from the map, it backs up into Mark Twain so that much should be safe."
"So we'll meet up with the owner tomorrow and give him the all clear on the house?"
"Sounds like a plan."
xxx
Gary drove his truck up to the family homestead to find the two men waiting for him, both sitting on the front porch. "Is it over?"
"First off, the poltergeist is gone. We reinforced the protections to keep it out, and it should be safe to go back in."
"Is there some way to get some sort of certification that this was done? In case it comes up when I put the house up on the market."
"You're serious about selling the place?" Sam asked.
Gary nodded, slightly surprised. "I told you that. It was the plan the whole time, but I couldn't in good conscience sell a dangerous place to a family that might be killed before they believed in what was inside attacking them. Thank you again for getting rid of the problem."
Dean grunted. "You are still going to have to be careful selling the place. The veil between it and the supernatural is weakened. We're not sure how that happened and we're less sure that it can be fixed. And unless it does get fixed, that house is going to attract all sorts of things."
That was not good news. "Who am I supposed to sell it to? No one around here is going to buy it. They all know about the… stranger who broke into the place and… killed my parents. And I won't sell it to someone who can't handle it. I don't want blood on my hands for some money."
"You won't be able to parcel it out, either," Dean said. "I walked the property some yesterday and if anything, the weakening spills out a bit, especially to the south. Pity. It's a nice piece of land."
"You want it?" Gary jumped on the possible solution. "I'll sell it to you cheap and land around here isn't expensive to begin with. Furnishings included, even. I've got everything I want to keep from the house already."
Sam blinked, apparently surprised at the offer. Dean chuckled, leaning back against the support beam of the porch. "He's been looking for a place. Got a wife and a son and another on the way."
"I'll make you a great deal," Gary said. "You're probably the only person who could handle it."
"I'd have to talk with my wife," Sam said faintly. "And check the finances."
"We can work out a payment plan," Gary offered. "Just so long as it's in writing so no one misunderstands, you can pay me for years."
"We'll think about it," Dean promised him. "And let you know one way or the other."
xxx
Billy was busy eating small pieces of banana when they got back, with Joan lending the occasional bit of encouragement and direction as she worked on a knitting project. "You need to say yes," she said as soon as they were in the room.
"Yes to what?" The answer couldn't be that simple. Not after all the work they'd put in trying to find houses and every time they'd been told 'no.'
Joan smiled and Sam couldn't help but smile back. There was so much relief and straight joy in the expression that it pushed away all the niggling worries that had been plaguing him since Dean had spilled the beans. "God said that's the house."
"Really? The place that had a poltergeist strong enough to toss Sammy into the wall?"
"Yeah, that worries me a little too," Sam interjected. "Are you sure?"
"Yes. That's the house. We're going to need to make it safe."
Sam glanced over at his brother, who shrugged. "I'll call Gary, then."
"I'll call Bobby. His place is a freaking fortress, man. He'll know how to fix it."
And just like that, the Winchesters had a place to call home.