The Peacock Farm – Chapter 5
Note: Side effects may occur – including, but not limited to, dry mouth, heart palpitations, and believing that TV characters belong to you. May result in a sudden urge to create fictional scenarios in which said characters (that belong to large media corporations) can play new games.
Rated: T for language and mature situations. It's icky. But nothing you wouldn't see on TV. Canadian TV anyway.
A/N: thanks for the reviews! They keep me happy and reasonably docile. This story doesn't have too much longer to run (maybe two more chapters), so the next bits will be bloody and long. Maybe too bloody long.
--
As Sam watched, the blood on the wall began to run, pooling on the floor, spreading, a river without a source.
Then a figure stepped into the hallway, took up considerable space between the bloodied wall and where Sam crouched on the bare floorboards. Too tall to be Dean, and too vivid, somehow, the colours of him all wrong, a TV set with the tint function awry. Wide, but shallow, rippled suddenly in the same way as a flag unfurled in the wind. Not real, but not some insubstantial whispy ghost, either.
The smell of meat, of a butcher's shop, hung in the air. The man's face slowly slid out of focus, then snapped back to clarity. Smiled, smiled at Sam, recognition sparking in his eyes, seeing something in the younger man that gave him amusement or purpose. Sam stayed very still, unable to move, to say anything. No screams anymore, no white light, no pain. Not that kind of pain, anyway. A different kind of pain was emerging, but it was in sequence behind the fear. Sam was not precisely afraid of this thing – demon, ghost, whatever this was – but he was afraid of what it had done to his brother.
Long face, glittering blue eyes, strong high cheekbones that looked as though wind moving across them at the right angle would make them howl. Age was absolutely impossible to determine; it did not matter, and was not worth the exercise.
"Ray Crimson?" Sam asked, voice small and hoarse. Then his fear turned to anger, dredged up heat in that frigid hallway, made of his voice an axe. "Where..."
The laugh interrupted his demand. Bony fingers hovered in the air, reaching for Sam's face. Instinctively, Sam knew those fingers would not touch, could not touch.
"Smart one," the figure breathed.
Sam took a ragged breath, came to his feet and the figure of Ray Crimson rose with him. They were of a height and Sam looked both into and through his eyes. Maintaining focus was difficult, for a good many reasons. From this angle, Sam could see into the room behind, the room from which this apparition had stepped forth; Dean was nowhere to be seen. The canvas bag sat unused, useless on the floor beyond. The blood continued to pool on the floor, crept towards Crimson's feet.
"Where is he?" Sam rasped, barely able to maintain his stillness now, desperate to race around, searching. Better chance of finding out what was going on here. With this thing in front of him. Dean is somewhere near here. His blood is here. God, his blood is...
"He isn't like you. Can't hear me, can he? An injustice has been done, and you must bear witness."
An injustice? An injustice? Sam's face contorted into a striking expression of question mark and fuck you. "Where is he?" Sam said again, not recognizing his own voice, eyebrows lifting, disappearing into his hair.
And directly behind Crimson, appeared a child, not more than six. Milky and faint, eyes the size of Canadian dollars, shiny, golden haired. It hazed in and out of existence like the radio reception in the Candleworks. It held a finger to its mouth before turning to run through a far door, out the back, soundless.
"He's a hunter. He understands the risks. You, though. You are something more than that," Crimson held up a hand, palm outwards, and it varied from green to red as it wavered in the air in front of Sam's nose.
"Get out of my way," Sam said and it was a statement of fact, something that he wasn't asking. "I'll deal with you later."
He didn't know exactly what he'd just promised, but it felt right, as final as if he'd signed his name at the bottom of a document. With those words, the specter of Ray Crimson shattered, flew apart in a million pieces, each flying to a different corner of the farmhouse where they shimmered before winking out like fireflies.
Without questioning anything, Sam scooped up the canvas bag, ran out the far doorway, his eyes searching for the small figure of the child. The door opened onto a summer kitchen, the window screens long shredded into cobweb threads, the back garden rife with brambles and moss and rock. The sudden image of the hand-drawn map came to him. The root cellar.
Over there, an open door in the side of a grass-covered hummock. Beside the door, almost invisible in the harsh sunlight, the child. A moment, and it waved to him, face serious as only a child can be perfectly serious. Then it was gone.
Sam would never remember crossing the overgrown garden, or the details of what else was contained in the root cellar. What he did remember, what was one of those things that would never leave him, no matter how long he would live, or how many shots of tequila he drank, was Dean.
Blood was everywhere, and the interior was so dark after the brightness outside, that he had trouble at first knowing where the blood was coming from. Then he saw: a deep gash across his brother's throat, but when Sam attempted to pick Dean up, his brother's arm swung from a crazy angle, tendons severed in another deep wound, and Sam felt his stomach rise darkly, like an ocean at night. A small terrifying hiss came from between his brother's blue lips and one hand gestured faintly to his heart. Oh god, his heart, Sam thought, as though that might matter, given the slashed throat. Panicking, he lifted Dean's sopping shirt to see raw burns across his chest as if acid had been thrown on him. A rattling, aching wet cough, and more blood gushed from Dean's throat and mouth. Sam snapped open his cell phone: no signal. Tried Dean's: the same. Sam wasn't thinking clearly, was thinking that if only he could get Dean out of there, it might be okay. There was no plan beyond that.
The root cellar wasn't close to the car, but then again, nothing was close enough to the car. Burdened with the weight of his brother, lighter by litres and litres of blood, surely, Sam staggered across the tangled garden, set Dean down by the closed gate before reaching up with a blood-streaked arm, wrestled with the chain, couldn't do it, couldn't manage it, felt the tears coming, the howl of frustration and fear.
The chain snapped apart like a slingshot, made a grating, metallic shotgun blast as it separated. Released, the gate swung silently open. Though he hadn't conceived of doing it, need had once again met talent. Sam wished he knew how he did it. Gasping and retching with everything that he still had to hold inside, Sam shouldered Dean again, got him into the back of the Impala, found the keys in Dean's jeans pocket, and sprayed gravel as he pushed the accelerator all the way to the floor.
The stench of abattoir filled the car and the shoddy, imperfect stereo immediately produced the indelible scream of Angus Young, as though he'd just been waiting patiently in the tape deck for them to return, left hanging mid-note from when they'd parked. A lifetime ago. Ohgodohgodohgod. Sam's breath was coming in wheezing little gasps, and he tried to concentrate on the road, realizing even as he did so that he had no idea, no idea whatsoever, where a fucking hospital was. He would not cry. Plenty of time for that when he'd figured this out.
Despite his resolve, the road swam suddenly, and Sam wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, driving too fast for these winding roads, the tires squealing on the turns, hot pavement creating sound from friction. I will save you. I will save –
Glanced at the rearview mirror, expecting to see the landscape flying by, and instead met Dean's green eyes, astonishingly alert. Then, right by his ear, so close he felt the heat of it, "Dude, ease up on the gas, man."
He swerved off the road at that point. Luckily, a dirt parking lot – a recycling depot – was right there, otherwise they would've been in the ditch. Sam slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel at the same time, scattering gravel and dust before the car came to a rocking rest.
He turned to the backseat, trying not to anticipate, wanting more than anything to hit Dean as hard as he was able. Dean sprawled across the back seat, had been thrown sideways by his brother's stunt driving, and now looked pissed off. "Jesus!" Dean shouted at him. "Where's the fire?"
"Look at you!" Sam screamed at him, ramming the car roughly into park before shutting off the engine. He turned completely around, almost climbing over the back of the seat, and grabbed Dean's shoulders with both hands as his brother came to a proper sit. "Would you fucking look at yourself?"
A little like a kid who'd just been told he'd spilled something on his shirt, Dean looked down to see his blood drenched chest and jeans. Slowly, his chin came back up, confusion turning to horror.
The gaping wound across his neck, on his arm, the burns across his chest, were faint pink marks, no more serious-looking than a sunburn or rash. The blood on their clothes and skin dried quickly in the summer heat, and by the time they pulled into the motel parking lot, nothing remained of the violence other than the dried blood. That and Dean's slight disorientation, and Sam's gibbering fear.
--
As soon as Dean was out of the shower, they argued.
It was inevitable, really, because the first thing Dean said as he emerged from the bathroom scrubbing his wet hair with a thin white motel towel was, "We gotta go back."
So many times over the years, it would have been easy for Sam to have given up on Dean, to let him go his own ornery way. If only Dean would've actually let him. He had a pit bull's grip, though. The big teeth and the locking jaw, impossible to shake. Sam had tried. He'd taken a bus to normal and set up house. And it had lasted until Dean had turned up in Sam and Jessica's living room, bulldog grin, offering an open road. Can Sam come out and play?
Sam didn't often seriously argue with Dean, not because he didn't have the chops – Sam would have been a fine lawyer, could argue circles around Dean – but because Dean just didn't listen. It was like having an argument with a batting machine. Those balls kept coming, no matter what you said. Still, he'd go down swinging...and, enough with the baseball metaphors, Sam counseled himself. "You're not going back there. He'll kill you next time."
Dropping the towel to his bare shoulders, Dean spread his arms wide, displaying himself as though he was about to take a bow after a theatre performance. "Yeah. That thing did a lot of damage. I've been hurt worse giving the car an oil change. "
Sam groaned. "Exactly my point," he returned, although it really wasn't his point. He was about to argue from both sides of the board. He wondered if Dean would see through it. "Why are we even doing this? So the farm's crawling with fucking ghosts. They don't seem to be hurting anyone. Shouldn't we get back to where we can, I don't know, save some actual living human beings?"
"You said that Crimson wanted you to witness something. He wanted you, Sammy, not me. And so I should walk away from that? He gave me exactly the same marks he gave Aurora, and it didn't feel exactly friendly." Dean was getting calmer, which wasn't a good sign. It meant that the next stage would be sarcasm, and then there would be no reasoning with him. "And we still don't know why it's the exact same fucking farm as the Benders."
Chew on that, college boy.
He wasn't finished, though. "The Benders didn't want me, either, if you remember. I wasn't the one they took from the parking lot." Dean came close enough that Sam could smell the soap. One finger, cold from the shower, prodded Sam in the chest. "You. They want you. Good enough reason to figure this thing out. If anyone shouldn't be going back there, it's you, not me. Besides," and here it was, and Sam had heard this tone often enough to know exactly what card Dean was about to slam on the table, "you left the weapons in the root cellar."
--
Okay, so Dean got the last word. Didn't mean, didn't ever mean, he got his way. It was a tacit agreement, that one. They weren't going to go back tonight, even if it meant that some lucky band of partying teenagers stumbled upon a sackful of arcane weapons. And one rock salt loaded rifle. None of it was traceable, Sam knew. And the root cellar wasn't exactly big enough for a party. Maybe the child's ghost would watch over it.
Instead, he convinced Dean to go to bed early while he stayed up looking through online journal archives and scanned the thin community phone book. He made some calls. By the time the local news came on – Dean was out like a Friday night drunk, snoring as though it kept away vampires – Sam had located RCMP Constable Bill Williams, retired, who had been one of the cops at the scene in 1972. Maybe because the hour was late and the ex-Mountie talkative, but Sam learned a lot more from a cop than he usually did. Sam fell asleep secure in the knowledge that before he went back to the Peacock Farm, before he went back to witness whatever he had promised he would, he would know what had happened from the mouth of someone who'd been there: Millie Thorpe, who lived across the river in Abbotsford, who was crazy as monkeyshit – according to Constable Williams, ret. – and who loved nothing more than finding someone to tell her tale to. Here's her phone number. Almost as simple as looking up in a laundromat and seeing it printed on a poster, Sam thought with a smile as he peered across at Dean's utterly slack face. Almost.
--
Constable Williams hadn't been wrong: Millie Thorpe was all kinds of nuts.
First of all, they had to sign in. Hospital regulations. She had no relatives, apparently, so the staff was excited as all hell to tell her that she had visitors, especially ones as handsome as you. That to Dean, not Sam, who would never get a complex about it, no matter how many times it happened. And besides, Dean could use the compliment: despite the long sleep, he still looked pale and a little shaky. Sam had watched him eat a Trucker's Breakfast at the motel's diner, which probably had the calorific content of seven deluxe sushi bento boxes.
They waited in the conservatory, really just a dumping ground for every dead and dying houseplant in the residence. The room was cooled by a flaccid ceiling fan, which is to say, not at all. Sam watched it go round and round as a rivulet of sweat ran between his shoulder blades and collected somewhere beyond his leather belt. Dean rattled his key – and what kind of life did they lead that between them they owned one key – against his knee as it bounced up and down.
"Still going back," Dean said, so softly Sam almost didn't hear him. He might have been humming a tune.
"You've already said," Sam replied, still watching the fan, hoping that by watching it, he might cool down.
"Just saying." Like the words to a song.
"I know," Sam said without thinking.
"Still going," in a singsong tone. This time Sam turned to him, igniting with sudden anger, only to get caught in Dean's wide grin, see the gleam in his eyes. Gottcha.
"Fuck off." Sam snorted, leaning back into the hard bench, the warped invention of some designer who had never, evidently, sat in it.
"All those years of advanced education, and that's what you come up with." A glancing, mocking reference. Only in jest, that's what they had in place of real conversation and it pissed Sam off no end.
Sam was saved from further fraternal torment by a tapping noise, the sound of slender wood exploring a terrazzo floor. From around the corner, a woman came into the room, feeling her way with a telescoping cane, grey hair wild about her face and shoulders, skinny as a Afghan hound, a huge smile on her face, lipstick haphazardly placed, as though without the aid of a mirror.
Without the aid of something.
In place of eyes, she had sheets of mottled skin, stretched like drumheads across sockets empty and dry. What next, Sam thought, wondering where the weirdness of this whole trip was going to end.
"My guests!" Millie announced delightedly and hugged them, although squeezing Dean cold like that was tantamount to embracing a crotchety rottweiller. He suffered it, though he didn't look pleased. "You want to hear about Ray, don't you?" she continued conversationally, waving around her stick as though she meant to skewer them. "Sit down, sit down. I haven't talked about this in donkey's years. Not since Polly came by doing her research and that's been ages now."
"You lived at the farm," Sam prompted, since Dean had blanched, whether a result of the hug or something else. They eased back into the uncomfortable seats and Sam got out a pad of paper and a pen. Millie kept smiling. She looked like a very fucked up sea turtle, and Sam was grateful he could concentrate on making notes while she talked.
Once started, she only stopped once, when Sam's pen ran out of ink; Millie waited while he fished around in his book bag found one before she started again. Sam had no idea how she knew his pen had died, or when he'd found a new one. For the whole time, Dean said not one single word. He had that raptor like quality to him again, vigilant, ready.
It was a hell of a story. At sixteen, Millie had been introduced to Ray Crimson. He had made quite an impression on her: handsome, intelligent, attentive. He made a small-town girl like Millie feel special and grown up. He had lots of women around him and it wasn't long before he'd purchased the farm for them all to create a new family. He'd told them that it had come cheap; there had been stories about the place. A family had lived there in the 1930s, a family about whom there'd been talk. Talk of sons sleeping with mothers, and deformed babies. It had unsettled the community, and no one liked to have it mentioned. Ray had seemed intrigued, Millie said, as though he thought he'd be able to harness that sort of thing.
At its peak, the farm had housed a small colony of men, women, and many children. People came and went. Millie remembered Aurora clearly: hard, practical, jealous. Millie's voice changed when she spoke of her; she'd been cheery, almost chipper before, but when she talked about Aurora, her voice went low, dead. The brother, Rupert, was trouble. He'd brought in money with the buttons, all right, and had been devoted to Ray Crimson, almost to the point of slavishness. But young Omni Radiance had been a special favourite of Ray's – beautiful, pure, good. Everyone could see that Ray loved her. Especially Aurora.
One night, Ray and Omni disappeared. By that time, Omni hadn't been able to disguise her pregnancy. Millie said that Aurora had gone wild, claiming that Ray had stolen all the farm's money, had disgraced the spirits they honoured. Then, clearly, so her visitors would make no mistake: "She wanted all of us to die, together. She poisoned the well. I told everyone to get out, and some of them did, hid in the woods. Aurora did this," and she gestured spasmodically to her face. "And while I was lying there, for days, up in my room, I heard other things. Dark things. Screams. It was a long time before the police came. I'll never forget the screams."
I'll bet, Sam thought, still looking at his pad of paper, at the tight scrawl that he'd perfected in the back of a moving car. His pen hovered for a moment, then he wrote, in upper case letters SCARS? and turned the pad to Dean.
Dean shrugged as though it was of no importance. Scars? What scars?
"What about Aurora's scars?" Sam asked, scowling at Dean.
"She did that to herself. Or had Rupert do it. She didn't want to go to jail. She said Ray Crimson did it. But he wasn't there. She had Rupert hide the baby..."
Sam made a little noise, then, involuntary.
"Omni's baby," Millie clarified. "She took it and raised it as her own. Then, when she was barely old enough, whored the child out to that brother of hers, and got her pregnant before she was fourteen. I kept track, you know. I have friends in the force. That's how they got Polly, god help that girl."
"And what happened to her? Omni and Ray's daughter?" Sam asked, felt he had to. "The mother of Polly?"
"Married her off to some relative in Minnesota was what I heard. Same place that Bob Dylan came from. Always loved Bob, but I'll be a brain surgeon before I'll be booking a trip there. The Benders, I think. That was a very peculiar family."
Sam swallowed and could find no sliver of satisfaction in connecting the dots between a farm in Hibbing, Minnesota and one in Mission, BC. "And Polly?" They hadn't seen any kids at the Candleworks, but he suddenly remembered Aurora saying that Rupert lived with them. Them.
"Oh, that poor girl. Spends her time hanging around the farm. I'd be willing to bet that both her grandparents were murdered there and that their bodies are buried on the property, though Polly didn't seem to know it when she visited me." Millie shook her head. "And no, I didn't tell her. Seemed...unkind. Besides, she was with her sponsor from the historical society. Some kind of school project. But she's getting to an age where she really ought to be away from that brother of Aurora's." She leaned forward, and Sam looked up. "He's not right. And he'll do anything Aurora says."
TBC