Chapter Five

Sam had to keep reminding himself that Dean said he was fine. But with Dean, fine could mean anything. He'd said he was fine after the whole Wendigo ordeal, but Sam had seen the bruising on his brother's stomach. He'd watched him patch himself up in the bathroom, tending to scratches. He'd seen the way his brother would grab his side for days after the incident. Fine, in Dean's world, meant absolutely jack shit.

Turning the corner, he spotted the object of his concern leaning against the Impala. He tried not to rush as he crossed the road to get to him. At least he's standing, Sam thought to himself. Dean spotted him and crossed his arms over his chest, a smirk on his face. Sam would ignore whatever smart ass remark Dean was ready to make until he was absolutely sure his brother wasn't hiding any serious injuries. Sam scanned Dean's body quickly, satisfied when he didn't find any gushing wounds or broken bones.

"Checking me out again, Sammy?" Dean asked. Sam looked up, but he ignored the comment. Dean seemed to be fine physically, but there was something in Dean's eyes. A lingering emotion that Sam couldn't place before it was gone from Dean's eyes altogether.

"You sure you're okay?" Sam asked, frowning as he watched Dean's face for any sign that his brother was lying to him. Dean nodded and Sam didn't pick up on much. "What happened?" Sam asked, finally able to get over the fact that his brother had been attacked. If Dean was hurt, he was hiding it well, extremely well.

Dean shrugged and looked in the direction of the electronics store. "Caspar locked me in a closet." He'd said it as if it was nothing. Sam frowned. "Don't think he was too happy starring in his own home movie." Dean tossed the video tape at Sam, who caught it awkwardly against his chest. He looked down at it momentarily before looking back at Dean.

"You saw it?" he asked.

Dean nodded. "Just orbs. But at least we know it's a ghost." Dean looked away, shoving his hands into his pockets. Sam watched him closely. There was something Dean wasn't telling him. He looked…shaken. But Sam wouldn't push it. If Dean wanted to talk about it, he would. Right now, they had a job to do.

"We know for sure that its killing in those woods," Sam said. Dean looked at him, asking him how he knew without even opening his mouth. "Carl Hannigan's body was found out there. And it was on Ally Westridge's jogging trail."

Dean seemed to think for a moment. "How long was it between Carl Hannigan's death and Jason Meyers?"

"About four days," Sam said, doing the math in his head. "Why?" Dean was looking at him with an almost quizzical look. "You think Carl Hannigan is our ghost?"

"Maybe," Dean gave honestly. "Four days is a quick manifestation period, though." Dean shook his head harshly. "Nah, it doesn't feel right. But hell, what was he even doing out there? And why did this thing start killing now?"

Sam shrugged. "Maybe it was waiting for the right victim?"

The brothers were thoughtful for a moment before Dean slowly broke into a grin. Sam watched it with trepidation. He hated the slow grins. It always meant trouble, especially from Dean. His brother's eyes were twinkling with something, excitement maybe. "Sammy, you up for a little breaking and entering?"

After a little searching, Sam and Dean managed to find Carl Hannigan's home. It was isolated on the opposite side of town from where the killings were taking place. Dean pulled the car up and looked out his window towards the now abandoned and boarded up house. It was shabby, old, and falling apart, partially hidden by trees. The gravel driveway was overgrown with weeds and saplings. One thin piece of police tape was across the driveway, but one side of it had come undone and it wouldn't have kept anyone out. It looked creepy enough, but Sam knew not to judge a book by its cover.

Dean got the shotguns out of the trunk and threw one at Sam. Sam looked at him quizzically. "You really think we'll need these in there?" he asked.

Dean shrugged. "Always good to be careful, Sammy."

Sam raised an eyebrow at that. "I think that ghost messed with your head," Sam said. Dean gave him a glare as he strapped a duffle bag over his shoulder. "You're never careful."

A snort from Dean told Sam that his brother hadn't taken offense. Of that, he was glad. Maybe his brother was all right after all. "I'm careful when I need to be," Dean answered. Then turned and looked at Sam, nodding his head towards the house. "Come on, young blood, let's go. I want to finish this one off by noon. Somewhere out there, there's a cheeseburger calling my name, ready to be devoured."

"You ever think of eating something where the main ingredient isn't grease?" Sam asked, hurrying a little to catch up with his brother. They walked up the gravel driveway and headed towards the back of the house, where their point of entry would be less conspicuous to anyone passing by. Though Sam highly doubted that anyone in town would care if someone broke into this house. He could only guess what kind of story a town like Shilling would come up with for Carl Hannigan's house. "You're starting to pack on the pounds."

Dean patted his stomach, but he was looking carefully at the boarded up window where he had decided they would enter. "It's all muscle, Sammy. This body is a temple."

Sam snorted. "A temple to what?"

"The gods of divine perfection," Dean said, though his concentration wasn't on the conversation. Dean felt the board that was blocking their way from entering the house. After testing its durability, he took a step backwards and kicked it in. The board immediately collapsed, creating just enough room for Dean and Sam to slip into the house. "After you," Dean said, holding his hand out.

Sam rolled his eyes but crawled through the opening anyway. The dust inside the house was remarkable and Sam had to cover his mouth to keep from coughing as it attacked his airways. He shone his flashlight around the room, noticing that there was a thin layer of dust on just about every piece of furniture in the room. Dean crawled in and added his flashlight beam to the inspection. "And you thought our motel was bad," Dean whispered, swiping some dust off the table with his finger.

"Let's just look around and get out of here," Sam said, frowning as he looked around the room.

"You having another one of your John Edward moment again?" Dean asked. Sam glared at him, which only made Dean grin and raise his eyebrows in encouragement.

"John Edward was a flashy con artist, Dean," Sam retorted. "And no, I just don't like this place."

Dean nodded. "Me neither." He pointed a finger towards the kitchen. "I'll take right, you take left?"

Sam nodded and headed towards the hallway to the left. It was dark, but Sam managed to find the living room. He shone his flashlight around and frowned. The living room looked as though it hadn't been touched in years. There were footprints on the floor, which were just barely visible as dust had begun to settle again into them. But, except for the dust, it was unbelievably clean. The far wall had a blue and purple striped wallpaper, while the other three walls were painted white. The cushions on the couch looked as though they'd never been sat on. The pillows were propped neatly, precisely. And other than a cloth doily on the coffee table, there were no decorations. Not a picture on the wall, not a plant, nothing. It was bare except for the necessary furniture. Sam highly doubted that Carl Hannigan had spent much time in this room, if any. The footprints were concentrated, as though he had walked in and walked out.

Walking over to the end table, he pulled open the drawer and waved his hand in front of his face as dust plumed out of it. He coughed slightly and his eyes watered a bit, but he rubbed them and looked back in the drawer. There was nothing inside except for dust and a mouse dropping or two. Sam frowned in frustration and closed the drawer, shining his flashlight around the room again. There wasn't any other place for Carl to hide things. Sam had hoped to find something, a newspaper or something.

Deciding he was done in this room, he started to leave but stopped suddenly as he looked once again at the footprints on the floor. He leaned down a bit and looked at one of them closer. They looked strange and at first Sam couldn't tell why. But after a bit, it finally hit him. They weren't a single set of footprints. Someone had walked over them many times, stepping almost exactly on the same spot. Except for a few times when Sam could spot the toe splitting in two, he probably wouldn't have noticed it. He followed the path they lead with his flashlight. The footsteps started in the hallway and went in a straight line towards the wall where they curved and headed back out towards the hallway again.

Getting up from where he was squatting on the ground, Sam looked at the wall. There was nothing to it really. The stripped wallpaper looked off against the white paint of the other three walls. Sam ran the beam of the flashlight up and down the wall, stopping at the bottom when he noticed something off about the trim. There were two lines cut into it, about three and a half feet apart, almost the size of a doorway.

Sam almost gasped out loud as he realized he was looking at a door. Who would have a hidden door in their living room? He was about to find out, he guessed.

Pushing on it a bit, he was disappointed when it didn't pop open. He looked around for a trigger maybe, like in all those mystery movies he and Dean had watched as kids, but there wasn't anything nearby. He pushed again, putting his foot against it, but it still wouldn't open. He bit his lip in frustration and then leaned against it, pushing it with his shoulder.

Sam was pushing so hard that when the door opened with a resounding crack, Sam didn't have time to catch himself before he fell forward. He was met with wooden stairs and could do nothing as the momentum sent him tumbling down the steps. It was a blur of motion and movement until he landed hard on his stomach on the concrete floor, smacking his chin with a sharp clank of his teeth.

Sam lay dazed for a moment. He started to assess the damage, knowing that he'd hurt in the morning, but he didn't think anything was broken or sprained, except maybe his pride. He started to pick himself up off the ground and heard Dean call his name from upstairs. Sam didn't answer him yet, still trying to collect himself. He got to his knees and started to brush himself off. He was covered in dust. He put a hand to his chin and when he pulled it away, there was a small amount of blood on his fingers. It wasn't a deep cut, but it smarted something fierce when he touched it.

"Sammy?" Dean sounded worried and Sam turned to look over his shoulder, up the steps, which he glared at hatefully.

"Dean!" Sam called to his brother, so he'd know where he was. Dean's form appeared in the doorway. Sam waved a hand at him before going back to brushing himself off. "Watch that first step," Sam said dryly.

"You okay?" Dean asked, coming down the stairs, squatting beside Sam, not giving him time to answer before he took Sam's jaw in his hand and tilted his head backwards, looking at the cut on Sam's chin.

"I'm fine," Sam said, yanking his head out of Dean's grasp. He wiped the blood away with the sleeve of his shirt before running his tongue over his teeth, checking to see if they were all safe and in tact. He didn't find anything wrong, to which he gave a prayer of thanks.

Dean stood, shaking his head. "You never were one for grace and style."

"Shut up," Sam spat, slowly getting to his feet. Yeah, he would definitely be sore in the morning. Dean reached to help him and Sam shrugged off his hand. He wasn't angry at Dean for wanting to help, he was more embarrassed that he had fallen down a flight of stairs. Why didn't things like that ever happen to Dean? But as soon as the thought entered his mind, Sam immediately dispelled it. He'd rather things like this happen to himself then to Dean. He didn't like seeing Dean hurt. He didn't like seeing anyone hurt, but especially Dean. It was probably something spawned from childhood. For years, when Sam was really little, Dean had told him that he was invincible, that nothing could hurt him. Sam had believed him. Sam had believed him until the day their Dad had carried an unconscious Dean through the halls of a hospital. He'd believed him until the day he saw his father's shirt stained in Dean's blood. Until the day he saw Dean laying in a hospital bed, eyes clamped shut in pain, with a hole in his side from some evil baddie that had caught his father unaware. He hadn't even been hunting. Sam had been four and he hadn't really understood what had happened, but he remembered that day as the day he found out that his brother wasn't invulnerable. Sam had never forgotten that.

But Sam's thoughts were quickly pushed aside as he looked at the far wall of the room he had so gracefully tumbled into. He reached for his flashlight, which had rolled up next to the stairs and picked it up, shining it at the wall. "Dean…" Sam said, calling his brother's attention to the wall. Dean turned and the brothers stood in a momentarily shocked silence, reading the words that had been written over and over again in black paint. It was one phrase, littering the walls.

Forgive me Piggy.

Sam had seen some odd things in his life, but he was sure that this one was right up there with some of the oddest things he'd ever seen. The words were written everywhere, on every wall, on the ceiling, in different sizes and different styles. It looked like some had even been scratched into the wall. The floor was the only space of the room that didn't have the phrase written on it. There was a desk to the side with an open notebook and piles upon piles of loose leaf paper. Some bookcases lined the right wall, stocked full of notebooks and loose pieces of paper. There were candles on the floor near the walls and piles of wax where candles had burnt down.

"Okay," Dean said, nodding his head the way he did when he was trying to convince himself that things were okay. "This is some really weird psycho serial killer shit going on, but this is a good thing."

Sam, not taking his eyes off the wall, tilted sideways towards his brother so their heads were close. He was almost afraid to talk loudly, lest there be something still lurking in the creepy room. "How is this a good thing?" He asked.

"Well," Dean shone his flashlight on the desk. "This gives us something to work with." He nodded his head towards Sam. "We got a lot of reading ahead of us, little brother. And since you're the college boy, you get the bookcase."

Sam eyed the bookcase. "Dean, there's like a hundred notebooks there."

"Have fun," Dean said, heading towards the desk. Sam shot the back of his brother's head a glare, but headed towards the bookcase anyway. He sighed, not knowing where exactly to start. He pulled out a few of the loose papers and looked at them. Forgive me Piggy was scribbled all over them. The hand writing looked frantic in some places and in others the writer had taken the time to draw out the letters and shade them and decorate them. All of the papers were the same, so Sam picked up one of the notebooks. He frowned and couldn't help but feel a little weirded out when he saw that the same phrase was written over and over again on every single page of the notebook. What got to Sam was the fact that it seemed to be organized with indents and punctuation and quotations marks and everything, as though someone had actually written something but only the one phrase had come out.

The lights in the room suddenly turned on and Sam jumped, spinning around, half expecting to find a ghost or a guy with a machete standing right behind him. But instead, Dean was looking sheepishly at him, grinning from his place next to the light switch. "Found the lights," he announced needlessly.

"Fucker," Sam whispered and turned back to the notebooks. He heard Dean whisper a name back, but didn't quite catch it, though he could guess a few derogatory names that Dean had come up with for him.

After two more notebooks, Sam sighed and shook his head. "Dean, in all of these, he just keeps writing the same thing over and over." Sam turned to look at his brother.

"Yeah, here too," Dean said, though he had taken a seat at the desk and was looking through the open notebook thoughtfully. "Looks like this is where he stopped," Dean said, pointed to the notebook. "It's kind of hard to read, like he had trouble writing it."

Sam looked at the number of notebooks on the bookshelves. "Dean, there must be years worth of these things here."

"I wonder who Piggy is." The words struck Sam by surprise. He turned and looked at his brother, who was running his fingers over the paper, looking at it as though it were something pretty. Dean's eyes were distant, as though he wasn't seeing what he was actually looking at. He looked to be somewhere else. Sam frowned at his brother's odd actions.

"Dean?" Sam called softly. Dean seemed to snap out of it, blinking a bit before looking over at Sam.

"Yeah?" Dean asked, his eyes drifting around the room.

"You okay?" Sam asked, setting down the notebook.

Dean paused his gaze on the wall for a moment before turning back to frown at Sam. "Yeah," he said it as though Sam had said something crazy. "I mean, this guy must have been a real nutcase, right?"

Sam watched Dean get up out of the chair. He was acting weird and Sam suddenly found himself wondering if maybe they should leave. It didn't feel like there was anything evil in the room, though Sam didn't know how reliable his feelings could always be. Maybe something was messing with his brother's head. Dean made his way over to the bookcase and stood next to Sam, running his fingers along the bindings of the notebooks. Sam watched Dean's face. He was about to tell his brother that maybe they should get out of there when Dean spoke up. "Quit staring, Sam."

"You sure you're okay?" Sam asked, watching as his brother turned to face him, his eyes intense.

"Yeah, why?" Dean asked, his brow marred with a frown.

Sam shook his head. "Nothing," he paused. "It's just, you're acting kinda weird."

Dean scoffed, a smirk coming to his face. "Sammy, we're in the middle of some grade A serial killer shit right here." Dean looked at Sam as though that's all that needed to be said. But Sam shook his head, not really knowing what his brother was trying to say. "You aren't pumped?" Dean's voice sounded excited. "Think about it, Sammy, we could be hunting our very own Hannibal Lecter, or Norman Bates, though I'd prefer Hannibal."

Sam let out a sigh and couldn't keep the irritation out of his face as he shook his head. He turned and walked over to the desk, not wanting to be near his brother at the moment lest his urge to smack him overwhelmed him. "You're an idiot," Sam muttered as he reached the desk.

Dean turned and looked over his shoulder, "What? You'd prefer Leatherface?" Dean snorted. "Carl Hannigan, yeah, that's a good serial killer name."

Ignoring Dean wasn't making Sam's irritation go away. Though he was still slightly worried over Dean's actions with the notebook, he knew his brother was back to normal now…as normal as Dean Winchester got. "I don't think he was a serial killer, Dean."

"Let me have my fantasy, Sammy," Dean called.

"Delusional fantasy," Sam muttered. But something else had caught his interest. He reached into the drawer and pulled out the book he'd found, brushing the dust off of the cover. "Hey, Dean I think I found something." Dean came over to the desk and looked at what Sam had found. "Looks like a high school year book."

Sam opened the cover and started flipped through the papers. There were pictures of students and teachers and clubs and banquets. It looked as though it was pretty old.

"Class of '62," Dean read as he bent to look at the cover. Sam continued to flip the pages until something caught his eye. He laid the book down and looked at the picture. Dean pointed to one of the pictures, the one that had caught Sam's eye. "That's interesting."

Sam had to agree. In the picture sat five young students. They were all goofing around, smiling happily for the camera. They looked like a motley crew indeed. Below the picture were the names and Sam couldn't help but feel like they had struck gold. He read the names out loud. "Carl Hannigan, Peter Flannery, Matthew Westridge, Susan Meyers, and Hank Reynolds."

"Five outta six ain't bad," Dean muttered.

Sam nodded. "Matthew Westridge and Susan Meyers. How much you wanna bet they're related to Ally and Jason?" Sam shook his head. "I don't think this is just a coincidence."

Dean reached over Sam and grabbed the yearbook. "I don't think Carl will mind if we borrow this for a while," Dean said, stuffing it into his jacket. He looked down at Sam. "Let's go have a word with our lone survivor."