Chapter Ten ; Can't You Feel the Power?

It was a pounding in his ears, Dean's ticking deathwatch, and that constant noise made pressure build up beneath his skin. It came to the point where, sitting in the town record hall, Sam wanted to scream loud enough to pop his lungs and tear off his flesh while he was at it. When he didn't exsanguinate, he'd also lop off his ears – anything to fool himself into thinking Dean really wasn't being marched down the dank hallway to his meeting with Death. If Dean wasn't doomed, all hope wasn't lost and when all hope wasn't lost Sam could go on with his life.

But, come on. How long could he keep it up? It wasn't working all that well to begin with, how much longer could Sam go on trying to convince himself that Dean actually had a chance of seeing his next birthday? It wasn't going to happen, that next cake with twenty-eight flaming candles, and it was as cut and dry as that. As if that wasn't bad enough, Dean was sodden with will for that to happen, he was absolutely willing.

See that blonde idiot sitting across from his younger brother at the oak table, staring at the same line of words in that old, thick book for the past fifteen minutes now? That one right there? Yeah, well, he was going to die sooner rather than later and he was going to allow for it to be like that. For a filthy empty promise Dean was going to give up a fight and let himself be killed. Christ Almighty, Dean was essentially driving the knife into his heart with his own two hands over a lie. What false hope could possibly be worthy enough to die over, to let some crazed bastard kill you for?

"Yeah, how could you do that to us?" was what Sam wanted to scream at his brother. He wanted to stand up and smack his older brother across his face, the kid who at one point in time had been his hero, and ask him what the hell was going on. Sam even opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was more ticking. The deathwatch had consumed his senses so much to the point of actually taking them over, though no doubt it was only in Sam's bothered little head.

To Dean, the fallen superhero, everything in the world might as well have been made of gold. If he was willing to pounce on the chance to give up on his brother, to abandon him and leave him for the ugly world with the sharp teeth just itching to bite and chew and simply ravage, then he deserved to have the most important things in his life become hard, cold and lifeless. Well, since the number one thing in Dean's life was already hard, cold and lifeless number two and down should get the curse of King Midas and the Golden Touch.

But everything in Dean's life turning to gold wouldn't stop Sam from being eaten away, from being consumed alive by the knowledge that he would be thrown to the sharks in a heartbeat over a few lousy, hollow words. It was all in his head, he knew, but as he looked down at his left hand – it was quite large, easily covering an entire section of a taxidermy petition – Sam could effortlessly see where it was fading away, fraying at the edges all because Dean Winchester was going to allow some Kook to poke around inside of him and put down the Lights Out card.

Dean yearned for something strongly enough to give up, to set down his bat and walk away from the plate at a full count, simply because of a bastard's promise. Hell, if Jonathan Meyers got cold feet, Sam would end Dean's game of life himself.

"It's something about the paint they use," Dean bored into his brother's evil thoughts loudly. "You'd never know they're certifiable."

The sound of old, thick records book sliding across the table further molested Sam's brooding. A lip curled into a grimace, he lifted his hand so as not to get a paper cut from the aged yellow pages continuing their journey to his line of vision.

"The guy looks like a freakin' Abercrombie and Fitch model," the elder finished sourly, and his wry compliments rang true.

The picture that had sparked Dean up so was held into place in the upper right hand corner of the page with a brittle, butterscotch colored piece of tape. The time locked, black-and-white photograph gave the newspaper clippings and few chicken scratch notes a face of flesh and blood; a face that looked as though it had been rubbed from an Impressionist's painting heavy in oil pastels. Naturally, the photo wasn't actually formed of painter's medium, but Jonathan Meyers's face was so strong, so clear, and so downright creepy in its model quality it might as well have been.

He was standing next to his wife, a might-have-been-attractive-if-you-squinted woman who screamed of a foreign land, on the steps of all things Arrowsic's local church – the one peering out over the lake with such a crisp white paint job it was nigh blinding. Meyers was wearing a suit, possibly brown because it wasn't dark enough to be a true black, with his hair gelled back and Greek statue face held high. According to the date tightly written in the bottom corner of the photograph, it had been taken one week before the Meyers were arrested. Well, Sam wanted to point out, he certainly didn't look as if he was worried about being caught.

"The more insane they are," Dean muttered, "the better they look. I'm telling you, I must be one breath away from that lovely padded room and the cups of cheery pills." He grinned, but it quickly washed away when he noticed his brother was anything but amused.

"He's certainly gone downhill in the afterlife," he said gravely. Sam leaned forward to be closer to the picture, his elbows sliding on the open pages of the books he had been looking through. "Really downhill, but I guess the realization that maggots are eating your prize winning body away'll do that to you."

One thing Sam wasn't going to be arguing about within the next century: the forever damp, salty air that seemed to be surgically attached to Arrowsic Island. For some ungodly reason, most likely straight from a wizardry book, the photograph Sam's nose was rubbing against was in pristine condition. Apart from the small, badly cut section of tape Sam would have thought the photo had been developed not three hours ago if he hadn't known better. Even the finest details he could make out; the raised grain in the wooden planks of church siding, the few bits of wind blown sand scattered across the front stoop, the (twenty, five, thirty) colored stones in the salamander broach on Emily's left breast, the almost distinguishable engraving in Jonathan's fancy shmancy cufflinks, everything.

Though Sam was too angry at Dean to come right out and agree with him, the moron was right about how sane Jonathan Meyers appeared to be on March 15th, 1946. Certainly no man who had a neon sign about his head saying "I be crazy!" could manage pinstripes that impossibly straight, could have his tie sit that evenly spaced between each brown lapel of his suit jacket, could have posture that friggin' perfect. Not a single strand of dark hair was out of place, nose not the least bit crooked or off center – hell the guy's entire face was perfectly proportioned, a ruler would only make it that much more obvious. Ten to one Jonathan Meyers spent longer in the bathroom than his wife and Dean combined – surely an impossible feat, but there was no other reasonable explanation to how two page spread ready the man looked.

Sam would have bet his head that the reason Jonathan had been so vain was because of the acne scars on his face, the horrifically deep and severe acne scars that looked more like third degree burns than anything else. The small picture was ghastly, so revolting that Sam wanted to gag and use the non-existent phone line to Heaven to speak with his sweet Jessica (surely she knew what kind of make-up this guy had needed to make the acne scars a little less let's-scare-the-kiddies-to-death bad). But, then came the big picture.

The Jessicaism that flashed through Sam's mind seemed to knit up the black hole in his stomach and drown out his brother's deathwatch, if only for a minute. She would have taken one look at the scars wrapped around the lower portion of Jonathan Meyers's face and said –

"DAMIRCOBS. Uh-huh. DAMIRCOBS indeed."

Dean blinked rather slowly. "That isn't some fancy, cut rate college… thing, is it?"

Sam, still sniffing the Meyers photograph, grinned (just when he thought all his memories of Jessica were being leeched and replaced by the images from that night, he remembered something as random and minute as that). "It's something Jess would say sometimes. It's one of her idioms, her style of artistic expression in the form of abbreviation. It stands for Dave Mirra's collarbone scar, you know that big nasty looking thing right on his left collarbone? Yeah, well, I know she'd say that if she ever saw this picture."

Again, the eldest Winchester brother blinked. Just what he needed, more proof positive that he was painfully slow to the catch. "Right. I understand you completely," he replied sarcastically.

"According to her, that scar is what makes Mirra attractive – 'if you take your contact lenses out', she'd say. Basically, whenever she'd be looking through a magazine or hear her girlfriends squealing about somebody she'd say DAMIRCOBS and move on. Like that Carmine Whodawhatsits. Giovina-something. I remember she tapped the television screen once, at his chin, and explained that the theory of DAMIRCOBS rationalizes why women think he's appealing."

"You let you girlfriend stare at other men's chins?"

Sam shrugged one shoulder, squinting at the finer details of Jonathan's face like the doctor's insanity would be characterized there somewhere in a pore or frown line. "As long as she didn't go around kissing those other chins, I had no problem with it."

"Yeah, well, she had a problem with her little theory, there," Dean said calmly, flipping through an old stack of newspapers. "That whole DAMERCUBS thing isn't why women freak out over Giovinaz – Carmine. It's his eyes. They're such a piercing shade of aquamarine…."

The brunette slowly lifted his head from the photograph.

"All right, so, what do you think?" Dean set the stack of newspaper headlines away loudly, looked back to the records book he had given his brother. "Meyers wasn't much for making headlines and what was leaked to the press about the murders you read about already on the internet. Guy's a freak, though, that much I'm aware of."

Sam scrolled his eyes down the records of everything he didn't want to know. If it hadn't been for the internet, as Dean had mentioned, the brothers would no doubt be trying to put together a picture puzzle in the dark. There was nothing anywhere of what was actually needed, what was crucial to saving the lives of everyone on Arrowsic Island. He should have known things were going to be hard when he met Gweneth Weiss, the woman who had watched her mother die before her very eyes.

Dean sighed and leaned back in his chair. "We know the exact date of when this bozo was born, when he got married, when he died. We know his parents' name, that he was an over-achieving child of two, that he at one point was going to become a lawyer, that his favorite color was yellow." He snorted. "But that's basically it other than that internet article you found the other day. God, everything else we've come to just mentions some award he received, some high money presentation to the church."

"Look up cover-up in the dictionary," Sam began.

"Yeah, this'll be the fucking definition."

There was silence between the two for a short while, Sam rubbing his temples and Dean trying to relieve some tension in his neck by cracking it. Finally, when no joints of Dean's wanted snap, he heaved himself back at the books.

"His work was popular, some of his speeches were mentioned in the articles. Said he believed to hold the key to helping people through… what was it called now, damn, I can't remember. Too much useless information rotting away my brain, behind that Fall Out Boy song I have stuck in my head and to the right of the pointless trivia question posted out in the foyer – what is the name of the German octopus who opens jars? Uh. The disease of… of–"

"Don't hurt yourself, Dean."

He rolled his eyes. "Very funny. But, anyway, this was back when people were freaking out about sexuality – aftershocks of the era when you couldn't say breast or thigh in restaurants. Meyers, there was only a brief mention of it, specialized in the ward of the Wade House catering to the rapists and whatnot. He had been convinced he had cured them when in reality he had only made them worse, but he still went on to the rest of the patients. The guy was looked up to as a saint, Sammy, a saint. The male version of Mother-fucking-Theresa. So," he breathed, "we know his motivation and we know about his crimes. But not where he was buried so we can throw salt on his corpse and torch it."

"We'll keep looking, there's bound to be a picture of the house or something else that can help us." Sam smirked. "We can always go back to Stephanie. With what she knows already she could be of great assistance."

Dean scoffed. "Great assistance my ass, she'll drive an ax through Beauty's tank."

"The car'll need a fill up eventually, Dean. Rainbow Brite might be our only chance of destroying Meyers

("Before it's too late, before he comes after you and leaves me without a vexingly violent pull to the diaphragm.")

and finally putting and end to this."

Looking like he had just eaten something rancid, Dean flipped through the newspaper cuttings to look at one he had read over ten other times. "We'll keep looking through the books, the internet. We'll find something."

Sighing, Sam was about to reprimand his brother for being so childish when movement snatched him away from the conversation, a kind of sweeping motion coming from the corner of the table.

He looked down and to the right, almost felt pulled to search for the culprit in that direction, and seemed to lose all control of his body. With the intention of looking behind him to see who had entered the room and passed by the brothers, Sam's eyes were lassoed and snapped to the photograph of the Meyers couple. Why, that's what Sam couldn't understand until, that is, he noticed what was so freakishly off in all the rational world.

They were moving.

Emily had one of her dainty gloved hands to her head, apparently either trying to keep her bonnet from flying away with the wind or her skull was going to detach itself from her neck. She was laughing silently, her straight pearly whites probably several shades lighter due to the violent shade of lipstick she was wearing (Sam assumed, of course, the photo still being black-and-white) and her somewhere-near-the-alps eyes narrowed in humor. Her other hand, thankfully aiding in what little decency there was to that moment by still being attached to her body, was slipped through Meyers's gentlemanly offered arm, fingers outstretched on her right hip. A single cotton rose swayed with the breeze.

Now, even though the people in the photograph thought themselves in a Harry Potter novel, Emily Reusch might have passed off as something close to normal. The thing that was really worrying Sam was the way Jonathan Meyers was acting.

The doctor was staring straight into the camera lens, which in this Twilight Zone moment was Samuel Winchester's corneas. Apart from an occasionally blinking set of eyes, there was nothing that might have indicated that Meyers was moving… until he cracked a demonic smile brighter than any sun and chose to show his amusement in whatever tickled Emily so. The really unsettling thing was that Sam could hear that laughter – in his head, not through his ears – and he didn't like what he heard behind it at all.

"Tick tock, Samuel. Tick. Tock."

And the pressue was spitting his skin, tearing a pathway to his raw and aching soul for disease to nest in and infest and destroy.