Chapter Five
But a song once sung of thee still echoes through the dreary air;
The sun was beginning to set now, but the brothers wouldn't have noticed the fireball dipping below the roof lines of houses and businesses whether they wanted to or not: the heavy brown curtains of their motel room were closed so that they couldn't see out and, the concept they were going for, no one could see in.
It wasn't a very exciting thought, spending the night in a disgusting motel room in the middle of town – literally – where anyone with the bright idea of going anywhere would pass by, their shadowy forms passing by the curtains and their voices coming into the room through the one leaky window and crooked mold green door. But there wasn't any choice, really. With Black Beauty currently resting next to her twin in Trude's garage, locked away from woodland critters and strange people with an affinity for gawking and breathing a little too heavily, the brothers Winchesters were stuck in a little nothing town in Ohio.
It wasn't really that bad, once they got past the stained carpeting, the greasy looking beds (at least there were two of them, though, to save some very awkward situations for a later date), the two lamps with their shades stained brown from cigarette smoke, the desk that was leaning at such a severe angle it was useful only for testing to see if gravity was still in check (which, after a test with a coin, proved true), and a cramped bathroom with a toilet that wouldn't stop running (the reason as to why Dean had slammed the door shut so hard it had shaken on its hinges), a sink with a noxious coating of toothpaste, soap scum, and the brothers didn't want to know what else, and a bathtub with a temperamental shower head and no hot water.
The mattresses were firm, yet lumpy, and it looked as though Joe Crede had recently stopped by, turned his head up, and spat his chewing tobacco onto the spotty once white ceiling tiles. The wallpaper was peeling and leaking some kind of nasty sludge at the creases and Dean was more than convinced this was all because he had flirted with the motel owner's daughter. Really, how was he suppose to know a good-looking girl like that was related to a wrinkly old-man with an eye patch?
But that wasn't what he was so angry about.
Actually, angry wasn't the proper adjective, neither was pissed off, enraged, irate, or anything else in the Thesaurus of Dean's mind – not that there were many synonyms in there to begin with. He was absolutely outraged, livid to the point of exploding like an overcooked Jiffy Pop popcorn pan, and slapping the sadness with the likeliness of a father with his child in the ICU ward didn't ease the flow of fuel to the fire.
What the hell kind of satanic monster would go after a poor, defenseless car? Sure, there were guns and holy odds and ends and monumental amounts of salt hidden in the trunk, but it wasn't like Black Beauty could sprout arms and use them.
Oh, fuck.
Dean stopped pacing just at the right moment to slam his knee into the edge of his motel room bed. He couldn't feel what pain there might have been, he was too incensed, heartbroken, worried to feel even the burning of a vampire's bite in the neck.
Looking at Sam, hunched over his laptop computer on his side of the room on his rank motel bed sheets, he quite evidently hadn't thought about the provisions still stashed away in Dean's Impala, the one that Trude offered to work on and towed away to her padlocked climate controlled garage and would at any moment find some very suspicious things if she acted on the whim of poking inside that spare tire compartment. For a college boy he wasn't very smart.
"We have a slight problem," Dean stated, as if he was Tom Thumb trapped in the stomach of a tramp dog.
Sam, face blue from the glow of the computer screen, put on his best let's-scare-Dean-to-death-with-seriousness expression. "Let her find the stuff in the trunk, Dean, because if we're messing with what I think we're messing with…let's just say that won't be a problem."
That cheerful statement flew right over Dean's pretty little head. "What do you mean, it won't be a problem? Finding shotguns in Beauty's trunk, wooden stakes, chains, and ropes I think constitutes as a very big problem. Sammy, if we get hauled off to jail you can kiss ever finding Dad again good-bye and start actin' real friendly to your cellmate, which won't be me if have anything to do with because life in prison stuck three feet away from you – forget about it, the car rides are bad enough!"
Sam, grave as ever, turned his laptop in his brother's direction and scrolled to the top of the screen. "Tell me you don't find anything very wrong with that article, with her witness statements."
With the drapes pulled and no lamps on, the blue glow from the computer monitor took a few seconds for one to grow accustom with. Sitting down on the bed, taking the laptop away from Sam and setting it in his lap, Dean started skimming the newspaper article with a sigh: as far as he was concerned, at the moment nothing could be a bigger problem than the spire tire compartment and what would be found inside of it by curious eyes.
Dennis Beiver, the dispatcher to take the little girl's call that night, tells the Chronicle very clearly what happened. "I couldn't make out what she was saying at first," he explains. "Through the sobs and coughing, sputtering I could pick up a few words, but most of it was lost in translation. I had to tell her to calm down a few times, to take a deep breath or two and to tell me again what happened. She kept saying things like, 'He's killed them' and 'I saw him do it, I saw him, but you won't believe me because everyone else says he's imaginary but he's not, not, not." It was frightening because this was my first call and I didn't really know what to do, I thought I'd be dealing with a heart attack victim or something my first time, you know? But I did what they tell you to do in training and got her address – she was so young and shaken up, she didn't know it at first – and kept telling her to stay on the line until the police came.
"I figured the only way I'd get her to not hang up on me was to try and get her to explain what happened, to tell me what she saw and if she could tell me who did it – help the police out a little, I thought. But that only made her into even more of a wreck and I felt really bad for that, so I changed subjects on her, you know, to get her mind off what happened. Puppies, she told me, she likes puppies, and her uncle's car – a model she can't really pronounce yet. She kept saying 'Johnny won't stop signing, you can hear it can't you?', but she wouldn't say who Johnny was and I couldn't hear anything other than her and the baby crying."
Why did this young dog and car loving little girl call Dennis Beiver? Because she had just witnessed her parents' death, the local police have just recently let tell. "Trude McFarland, eight came this Halloween morning," Deputy Sheriff Mark Hommes, 27, said in his press release, "was kept awake by the severe storm that hit us that Friday night. She was hiding under her blankets, singing over the thunder, when something ripped those blankets from her and there were her parents – very much alive but, she told us, something then killed them the moment the sheets were off her head. We've been put under scrutiny by the town for not apprehending this criminal, for not finding even the murder weapon, but there is no (murder weapon). This bastard used his hands," cont. C3
Beside the article was a black-and-white photograph of the McFarland family as it once stood; Trude, a cute looking tot, Jo still in diapers, and their parents Marjorie and David, thirty and thirty-nine respectively. They were carving pumpkins at the annual harvest festival, only three days before the murder.
"Did you catch that, Dean?" Sam asked, as if his brother was stupid and didn't know what was going on. "'Eight came this Halloween morning' and this first murder happened one day before she was born. Actually, two hours and forty-five minutes before she was born – I looked her birth date up pretty easily, it was mentioned in the paper; David was a high-profile attorney. She was born at midnight on October 31st – Saimhan," he pronounced it sow-en. "That's Celtic New Year, a day in which, the Irish believed, the spirits of the people who had died that year would come back and look for living bodies to possess."
Dean raised his eyebrows and handed the laptop back to Sam. "Apparently she wasn't wearing her costume to scare those rude spirits off. I mean, really, it's not very nice to walk up to someone and say, 'I'm going to posses you now, do you mind?'"
"I'm serious here, Dean."
"Then we'll preform another exorcism and be done with it, quicker than pie, and get the hell out of here before the Secret Service decides it would be a good idea to rush us."
Sam, who had been lying on his stomach propped up by his elbows, moved himself into a sitting position. "And if it's not that easy? What if… what if this is a different kind of possession entirely? You've heard what was said in that gossip ring, what Anne rang off to us: Trude sees something that ought not be there. I do think a spirit came to her when that door was opened, you know what some people say about the hour between 11:00 and midnight, but I don't think it possessed her. If Trude was possessed, was walking around with someone else's spirit holed up inside of her for the past twenty-something years… it wouldn't appear for her, she wouldn't be able to see it, and you certainly wouldn't have that connection with her."
"Then what, prey tell, is going on here?"
"Honestly," Sam said, waving a hand in the air to indicate that he had absolutely no idea.
Dean huffed, rose to his feet and returned to pacing. "That's just great, it really is. All that money wasted on college and what has it given us? A fucking–" he mimicked Sam's hand waving with disdain. "My car is ruined and that's all you can give me? I don't know?"
For a few moments Sam didn't speak, was too busy gritting his teeth. "Maybe–" here Dean scoffed rather snidely "–maybe this spirit was assigned to her. What I mean is, it's certainly not an Average Joe who was simply looking for a warm place to stay in, a normal spirit wouldn't do that. So what if this thing, this 'Johnny' is from Hell? That would explain why it's been killing people all these years, why you get so freaked out when those connections are made. It was assigned to her, something like that, and in that spiritual hour on that extra special day it snuck into this world and latched onto her. It's taken on the form of this Johnny guy she was talking about, apparently a man she sees when she looks at it. Trude's not possessed, not in the traditional sense, but she's bound to this thing by one of the thickest ripcords imaginable."
"A devil wouldn't sing the Dreidel Song, Sammy."
"You said it yourself, you don't know the words to the song. Sure, it has the tune of the Dreidel Song, but Heaven knows what the lyrics are."
Dean shuddered at that thought of what those lyrics might be. "So how do we get rid of this thing before it drops Los Angeles on Beauty just to be funny?" The anger was coming back tenfold, boiling over and steaming from his ears.
Sam, slipping into meekness, twisted his face into one of the cousins of a grimace. "We cut the ripcord, of course."
Snapping his fingers, Dean made toward the door. "Salt bullets and holy water, a wooden cross and the Bible? We just need to get Trude away from that garage a while so we can break the lock and get in there, but how?"
"Dean."
He turned around, confused as to why Sam was still sitting on the bed with that I-just-ate-rancid-pork look on his face.
"Aren't you coming, Sammy? You know, the whole Two Amigos shtick we do?"
"You slept through English Literature, didn't you?"
Dean cast one of his trademark smiles. "Flirted with Cassie Umbrik, actually. Man, that girl was something else. Why?"
Sam shut his eyes, winced like someone was pulling at something deep within him. "'Two men, from opposite sides, bound together by a Siamese ripcord tethered to their souls. Who will pull first, knowing that it will destroy them both?'"