Chapter Thirteen ; A Black Veil
Completely upon chance, as Sam started walking around to the other side of the island toward what might or might not be left of the Meyerses' home, he passed by the local church and seemed to have been carried into it by the tide of people from the street crashing in through the front doors.
Certainly it wasn't a church service, not this far into the day, and so Sam didn't fight the many bodies pushing him up through the long line of pews. He waited for a break in the wave, one small enough for him to squeeze through without getting himself trampled to death, and found himself an inconspicuous place to sit in the back of the room, behind a young woman with the bill of her Boston Bruins cap raised high so she could easily look up without having to move her entire head.
With the island still draining into the church, Sam looked around the small building as casually as he could. The nave was a booming echo of anxiety, the air – though heavy with incense – was even heavier with fear. Because of that fear, most of the residents of Arrowsic Island who came into the church stopped at the font, as if it would calm their nerves, before settling themselves into the pews (first crossing themselves, something Sam had astoundingly remembered to do) and talking feverishly with the others around them.
Though the Bruins fan blocked most of Sam's view, as he sat there slouching and badly trying to move into the wall by the act of osmosis, he was pretty sure of the fact that the person who ran the show around this island was standing between the choir screens at the high altar. There wasn't enough light in the seasonably dreary day to paint his or her skin all the colors of the imagination, but the immense stain glass windows would undoubtedly awash her (or him) in something much more important in their mind: power.
By the static charging the air, making it absolutely alive and twitching with an almost visible shade of panic, Sam knew that power was what the islanders needed at the moment. Power to ease their minds, power to rectify a bad situation, and power to keep the goings on inside the church silent to the world outside of the wood siding and religious scened windows.
To Sam he wouldn't have been shocked at all to find out that he'd stumbled into another world entirely, that was what the place felt like. Somehow, someway unbeknownced to him, Sam had put on one of the Magician's rings and was sent to the land of puddles. He must have slipped, fallen into the one closest to him, and that was all she wrote. He wasn't in Narnia, but this definitely wasn't the Arrowsic Island of passerby either.
This was a new and strange land, one abuzz with anger and fright, one Sam shouldn't have come into. But like a child having just discovered something new and wondrous, he couldn't look away even if he wanted to, for the king of this hidden land had just rapped on the large Bible kept on the stand at the high altar.
"Have we all settled ourselves?" a man bellowed, and Sam would have bet his old apartment that this rich baritone (natural or brought out by the tall nave and stained glass) had once been a choir boy here, had once sung in one of those very choir stalls.
A woman with an aging voice from somewhere to Sam's left spoke up loudly, words sailing above the quieting murmur of curiosity around her. "Settled?How can we possibly be settled?"
The murmur quickly became a roar of agreement that made Sam's bowels vibrate along with the pews. The man next to him, looking old enough to have seen the birth of the sun, stomped his foot on the ground.
"I must agree with you, Eliza," the king responded. "These are hard times and seem to have not any sign of getting easier that we might see, but I simply asked if everyone has found a seat and that the doors have been closed so that no reporter might come in."
Another world, no way to deny it.
The woman in the Bruins cap turned her head to look back at the doors, a fierce look in her eyes that the cheery pink of her cap couldn't disguise. They landed on Sam, an impossible green that seemed to burn with an emotion he hadn't wanted to know could possibly exist.
He smiled softly at her, tipping his head as a Texan gentleman might do around a southern belle. When the Bruins fan turned back around, Sam shut his eyes in relief. This new world was ugly and he didn't like it.
The king, from his thrown upon the high altar of the modest church, might have swelled to an impossible size. "Good, good. Now, let us bring ourselves to what we all have come here for." He could have pounded his fist on the Bible below his hands again, the sound hollow and ominous. "We have congregated here for a long time now, my friends, but have found no answers. I ask you, have we not been looking for them hard enough?"
Another bell curve of sound, this one laced with bitter confusion and – if Sam dissected it correctly – spite.
"We have not, my friends, we have not at all. Our children are still being taken from us, our wives and husbands, our brothers and sisters," the king reminded all of his people. "What does that say about us, friends, what does that tell you?"
Sam didn't really care, all he wanted was for this guy to come to the point before the torches and pitch forks were handed out.
The old man beside him mentioned penance in a voice that brought to Sam images of sawdust, several other people threw it up into the air as well in voices ranging from honey to velvet smoke. At the high altar the king must have thought the same thing, for he said something that made this new world slip further down the ladder.
"Penance, yes, my friends! We have sinned, just like all men, but we have been chosen to be put through this course of righteousness. But now I must ask you, also, friends, if this is not the work of some darker force, of something that has once been banned from our land but has reentered it long ago under our very noses?"
Sam raised his head, knowing full well that this king was speaking of the whole Satan bit, but sat up straighter because maybe. Oh, maybe.
More talking again, this time hushed and like small ripples in a filled bathtub. It was what that bathtub was filled with that made Sam wonder, made him hope.
"Friends, we have talked about this many a time before. You all know very well what I mean."
Well, not all, but at the pit of Sam's stomach he might have been happy with a bent answer. Since he had come out of the puddle he had fallen into, entered this world like the magician's nephew had once done with others, it had only been painted over with darker colors every few minutes. It was like Rembrandt had been unhappy with the first set of colors, wanted the picture darker, darker, darker...
"The sinners are being taken from us, my friends, sent to their judgment day, but are we not still here? Have we not been left to come here and wonder who it is that is doing this to us, wonder if this is not a curse but a blessing?"
It was gnawing away at Sam, something he should have known from the moment he sat down, something he should have felt and been able to recognize, but what?
"A blessing?" a women shrieked, this one up ahead of Sam.
There was a pause, maybe meaning the king was nodding or crossing himself or simply rolling his eyes while slapping the heel of his hand against his forehead. When he started speaking again, his voice was as strong as ever.
"I know," he said loudly, voice bouncing from the arches to the ceiling to the people huddled in the pews. "I know it is a ghastly thing to think of, and I am shamed to have mentioned it–"
But was he really?
"–yet you must remember this, my friends, that our young ones who have committed all of these atrocious sins have gone into the bright light. They have been cured of what has been..."
The king's voice began to fade away as the horror of the moment sunk deeper into Sam. It seemed to rot him away as it traveled farther and farther into him, twisting about and then coming back out of him to finish the job.
Sam rose to his feet, his knees hitting the small container holding an old, worn Bible, and was able to see more clearly the world into which he had fallen into. Over the heads of the islanders his eyes went, over the people who were only frightening because they were so desperate for answers, and to the high alter.
He couldn't see the king, not through the choir screens, but he could see the evil resonating out of it from between them. A swirling, dark mist floated through the air and appeared to be carried up to the top of the nave by what wind there might have been, the slight breeze that spread the scent of incense and made the votive candles flicker.
But the mist didn't go all the way to the ceiling, didn't pass through it and wasn't caught up in the extravagant wood molding there was up there. The evil coming out from the high alter, in its form of charcoal mist, separated high in the nave and came raining down – slowly, as if someone at the switch board hit the wrong button and slowed all the action down to a snail's pace.
("You might want to make friends with the snails then, buddy, because we might be here for a while.")
A very long while. How does one escape from hell, exactly? And if this really was hell, the baritone in the high altar surely was the freaking ring leader.
Sammy, so caught up in watching the dark mist sprinkle down onto the heads of the unsuspecting islanders – all ten of them, dude, with their secrets and suspicious glances – he didn't once excuse himself as he walked out from his pew and into the middle of the nave. The woman in her pink, adjustable Bruins cap had her eyes on Sam again, he could feel that, but at the moment all he was worried about was who that drifting near black mist belonged to.
"What is it, son?"
The king seemed to be bigger than ever, his voice higher than the sky, and it chilled Sam to the bone.
With every last living resident of Arrowsic Island watching him, Samuel Winchester lowered his head from the fancy and labor intensive décor on the ceiling and tried to prepare himself for what was waiting for him beyond the choir screens. He didn't want to have to take his attention away from the evil mist, but Sam knew he had to.
The man standing behind the Bible stand, either one of his hands on the edges of the wide pale oak book holder, was smiling a decayed smile that made his third degree acne scars look more like thousands of gaping mouths, hungry for the flesh of the innocent.
Meyers winked once at Sam and snapped out of existence – along with the mist, right before some of it could manage to touch the kid's hair – just before Winchester might have screamed.
It was as if someone had turned on the spotlights, the church suddenly so bright it hurt Sam's eyes. Squinting, he looked at the man who had replaced Jonathan Meyers nutso MD, literally in the blink of an eye.
He was a proud looking black man, with a warm face and even warmer smile.
"If I've upset you with my words, son, I do apologize. You haven't been to one our meetings before have you?"
Sam said nothing, he was so far beyond stunned to even remember how to breathe.
The man's smile didn't falter as he nodded gently at Sam.
"Well, son, I'm afraid you've gotten your first taste at what goes on in here. Again, I feel gravely ill for offending you."
Sam smiled at whoever it was that man should be called, but it looked more like the facial expression a guy who had too much to drink makes before vomiting all over himself. "No harm done," he said meekly and high tailed it out of the building before Gweneth Weiss realized who he was.
&&&
Sam felt like he needed to hit something. Just walk up to the closest thing to him and let it all out, punch and kick and snarl until he simply couldn't anymore because, Houston, he had a problem. A very big problem indeed.
The Meyerses' home, which had been built on the far side of Arrowsic Island at the precise location Sam had gone to – not an inch further to the left or right, not high or lower than his tennis shoes – hadn't been where it was suppose to be.
After the incident in the church, Sam had practically broken into a run all the way to the other side of the island. He had carried the piece of notebook paper he had written the address on and must have looked at the thing two hundred times, standing on the house's former site like an idiot.
The entire house must have been lit up like a candle for the Georgetown fire department to practice on or maybe leveled for the sake of leveling. All that was left of the Meyerses' home when Sam had gotten there was a large plot of green grass and in the middle of it what appeared to be a black granite gravestone. By the closer look of it, though, with the vibrant and meticulously trimmed rose bush on three of its sides it was a memorial. If it was a memorial, Sam had concluded, that probably meant that not only was the house kaput the basement had been filled in with earth.
"Fucking Christ," Sam had muttered. "You bastard. You fucking bastard, I bet you're so amused by this. Aren't you, you little tyrant? That act in the church and now this? I bet your side is just splitting!"
The land had sloped upward, framed by trees on either side that led up to the cliff. From where Sam had stood, looking past the monument to the doctor's victims, he had seen the dark green grass slice off into bright grey sky. Beyond the trees, aiding as a kind of bumper system to draw the eye to the drop off, had been mounds of dark grey and black rocks, jagged until the tide line hit and then everything was worn smooth.
"And I bet the townspeople dug up your body and burned it, didn't they? That's why everyone's so hush-hush about you, they figure that if no one can find your filthy corpse the better off the island'll be. But you showed them, didn't you? You showed them."
A cloud had passed over the sun, shrouding everything in an even muskier grey that had brought back visions of the mist in the nave of Arrowsic Island's local and only church. The cold wind had seemed to pick up in stronger gusts, slicing through Sam like he had been nothing more than cheese cloth.
"I'm going to get you, do you hear me? Body or not I'm going to get you!" Sam had screamed into the wind, the words hardly getting anywhere at all before they had been shoved back into his face. He had made that promise to not only mad Doctor Meyers, but to the world, to his brother – somewhere out there with no idea that he had escaped the jaws of death.
Now Sam was back in his Driftwood Motel room, dressed down to his traditional night clothes and all ready for a (don't kid yourself) good night's sleep. He was sitting on the edge of his mattress, facing the twice locked door and Dean's empty bed.
Currently the only two things that Sam had found to let someone, anyone in on the fact that "Dean Winchester was here" were his smell and the note he had left behind for Sam, sitting there between the two pillows so forlornly.
Sam picked up the message tentatively, a thought popping into his mind that the piece of paper must have been soaked in some kid of virus that would bring about something from a Stephen King novel. When no handsome form of Satan came up to him and tried to drag him off to the Archangel's army with the promise of power, wealth, so on and so forth (not to mention blah blah blah as King would say) another thought glowed like a flame in a dark room: what the --- ?
The was nothing written on it but some foggy, backward numbers that happened to be, when Sam flipped the tiny sheet of paper over, Carlie's cell phone number. Who was Carlie and why Dean had left her number on Sam's bed was so far beyond him it hurt like a pesky splinter. He didn't get any bad vibes from it, though – maybe an overpowering stench of women's perfume, but no ugly sensations at all – and was confident in the fact that it wasn't a death threat.
Setting the reeking note on the nightstand, Sam laid himself down on the bed. Exhausted and confused, pained by the day's events and angry, it didn't take long for him to fall asleep. His eyes like ten pound paperweights, he drifted off to dreamland almost as soon as he shut those heavy, glossy hunks of glass.
He completely missed the doctor standing in the corner of the room, his blood-stained surgical garbs hanging like over starched table cloths on his small frame.