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Chapter Five
They spend their time researching and laughing over old television shows playing at three am when neither can sleep but won't admit to it. Sam's nightmares seem to dissipate, interrupting his sleep less and less until one night, Dean can't remember a single instant of his brother's discomfort rising to a level that would normally wake him.
If he slept.
Being in the throws of nightmares or night terrors clouds memory, so Sam has never been able to keep a tally of how often Dean awakens at night, caught in between pressing circumstances and emotions he'd rather not show. Years of hunting taught him to be a light sleeper, listening for those things that went bump in the night, evil or drunk, stumbling around whatever room he called home.
Storms roll in and out; thunder and wind whirling outside keep Dean awake at night.
He covers it well during the day; Sam isn't used to being the protector, the one who notices these kinds of things, and only shoots varying side-glances in Dean's direction as they continue their research and take in the island's sights.
Sam visits the graveyard a few more times but doesn't find a thing. He lives in a world of disappointments and burrows in deeper each time he returns unsuccessful.
"We need to go to the beach," Dean finally suggests one afternoon. The clouds are thin overhead, making the day somewhat enjoyable, and the brothers are sitting on the outside patio of a restaurant in town for lunch.
Sam puts down his sandwich, something healthy for once, not dripping with grease. "I didn't exactly pack my bathing suit."
"I'm serious," Dean pushes. "Kick back, relax, take in the ocean."
"This is sounding more and more like some Zen field trip. I'm not a girl, Dean, I don't need to decompress."
"Hey, it's a beach."
Sam snorts, getting his brother's double meaning. "Right. Sorry, not really in the market."
Dean swats him on the arm. Leave it to his brother to find the most depressing thought about a relaxing day at the beach. He looks up at the sun trying to struggle through the clouds and wishes it were warmer. Just a few degrees, enough to shake this sense of mourning blanketing the island.
"We still don't know much about that lighthouse," Sam says, now picking at his food. "All the websites say the same thing. I'd like to go to the library, see if I can find something new."
"I suggest the beach, and you want to go to the library," Dean sighs. He shakes his head. "You're such a freak."
"Bitch." But he's smiling, and that's an improvement.
"I can't see how you eat this rabbit food," Dean finally complains, tossing his sandwich onto his plate with an air of finality. "There's gotta be someplace with real food around here."
"Shut up and eat your lunch," Sam orders, but his tone is lower, more authoritative. Dean throws a napkin at him, but complies. It's not everyday Sam impersonates his brother from their younger days, and he likes thinking about those times when a can of Spaghetti-O's and peanut butter and jelly were as special as four course meals for them.
Since then, Dean knew they could take care of themselves.
Instead of the library, Dean rolls down the windows and heads out onto the main road connecting both sides of the island. A soft breeze crosses the tall grass growing wild in the no man's land between the main town and the dead village on the other shore. He considers this spring cleaning; air circulates through the car and brushes out all those lingering scents of blood and dirt and sweat mingling together in the soft leather and replaces it with cleanliness. A new start, though they're still working through old issues.
Sam doesn't ask questions, just takes his place in the passenger seat and lets Dean pick the direction; there isn't far to go, but he's relived they haven't driven onto a ferry yet and bid the island ado. Dean's sense of loyalty is one of his strongest traits, and if Sam says there's something there, there has to be -- he'll stay at his side and investigate until Sam's satisfied and ready to leave.
In the three days they've been staying in town, neither have mentioned their aunt, nor how Alex might be doing. That ship's sailed, and both seem glad to be away from the influence of other people. They work better on their own.
After about twenty minutes, the car slows as Dean takes a turn onto a smaller, unpaved road and starts climbing a steady but subtle slope of green and brown. All that's visible is the blue-grey sky up ahead and the straight line where sky meets earth. There's a point of black in the distance that grows steady until the glass house holding the light becomes clear. Sam tenses in the passenger seat as Dean takes a slight turn and the tower comes into view.
From here, the entire island is spread out below them.
The car slows so the crunching of the gravel under the tires can be heard over the engine. Dean kills the engine, slides the key out of the ignition, and pushes open his door with that squeak of metal against metal -- a sound cars don't make anymore, with their plastic parts. He'd never dream of oiling it; the sound reminds him of trips to the store with his parents, when his mother would open the back door and lift him up out of the car.
Now it reminds him of his father, of the years they spent together, and how nothing was really said. He's no closer now than before to really knowing his father, but it doesn't bother him. Life's become the repetition of a pattern learned long ago, and following his father's part of that.
So has protecting Sam, though he can have a little fun with that one.
"Hey, you coming?" he asks, leaning over to shout through the open window. "You wanted to know more, well," -- he holds his arm out -- "here it is."
"I meant records," Sam says, extracting his lanky frame from the car.
"It's too nice to spend the day inside," Dean remarks. It's not easy being the outgoing one of the brothers, and if Sam can get him inside to research and read a few good books, he can drag his brother out once and awhile. "At least we're at a beach."
He points to where the hill drops off suddenly and the ocean's visible right past it.
"That's a cliff, Dean."
"So? It still counts, right? There's gotta be a beach around here somewhere." He finds it cooler here than back in town, and rubs his arm through rolled up sleeves as he wanders towards the cliff to look over the edge. Finding it, he smirks, and turns back around.
Sam's standing near the marker sign put up by the Coast Guard, craning his neck to look up the side of the tall white lighthouse. Dean crosses the grass separating them and stands next to his brother, following his gaze up to the top where the electric light sits whirling around, throwing beams of white into the yellow sunlight.
"That's tall."
Sam glances over at him, pulling his eyes from the building in front of them. "Were you dropped on your head as a child?"
"Whatever," Dean shrugs. There's a fence surrounding the lighthouse, a chain-link fence that's seen better days. Rust coats most of the metal, brought in by years of sea air, and it buckles when Dean takes a run and jumps up over it. He flips smoothly over onto the other side. A clatter behind him tells him Sam's followed suit, though he does mark the hesitation.
"Dude, check it out." There's a lone green swing set standing behind the lighthouse, one of the swings still attached though doesn't look like it'll hold any weight.
"It's a swing set."
"It's a creepy fucking swing set." Dean turns his back on the set and shivers for show. "You got your lock pick?"
"You seriously want to break into a light house in the middle of the afternoon?" Sam asks. "What if someone else pulls up?"
"No one's gonna come up here, Sam. It's a light house. Who visits a light house?"
Sam rolls his eyes. Dean's missed out on the more educational field trips in his life, skipping right past museums and national landmarks to see the seedy hotels of the world most kids don't see until they're in high school. He doesn't understand why someone would come up here for fun when the beaches were open and the weather was nice; there were so many more exciting things to do.
Dean relents, seeing the logic in his brother's objection. "Fine," he grumbles. "But we are so looking around. I didn't drive up here for the view."
--
Returning when it was dark wasn't appealing to Sam, but he knew what had to be done. Telling Dean he was getting weird feelings from the light house would only jump-start a tirade of jokes at his expense lasting through the day and perhaps, if his brother was feeling particularly devilish, the next day as well. While he respected Dean's coping mechanism -- God knew they both had them -- hearing a string of pop-culture references to psychic abilities became old. Fast.
They would also bring questions, questions he wasn't sure he could answer. Feelings didn't come with clear pictures or notes; putting sensations such as these into words was difficult enough without Dean firing questions at him before he even finished. No. These were best kept to himself until they learned more. Maybe learning the history surrounding this place would help clarify things.
Such as why he had no intention of going anywhere near that swing set, and almost felt the set had the same polarity as him, repelling him farther away the closer he got.
What had started with strange dreams and occasional sightings had grown into constant nightmares and actual sightings of...things. Mostly feelings, sensing places where spirits lingered, bad things had happened, places that went bad. Some days, it could be overwhelming.
"Hey, you've gotta come over here," Dean calls. He's back at the cliff, standing at the edge, looking down into the ocean below. If Sam's repelled by the swing set, Dean's attracted by the cliffs in the same manor he seems to find danger and engage it at every opportunity.
It's in the opposite direction of the swing set, so he joins his brother a few steps further back than Dean's standing.
"That's a big drop." Dean turns to look over his shoulder, then back down the cliff. "It'd be bad if you fell off the light house, but, man, totally worse if you fell from there, then fell off here." He winces. "Ouch. You don't recover from that."
"Here's the bigger question. How would you get from there," -- Sam motions to the grass at the base of the light house -- "to here, and then fall? Don't you think a fall from up there would kill someone?"
There's a breeze, and Dean hugs his arms. "Weirder things have happened."
"I doubt Ruth Chillins was a creature of the night."
"That kid, Thomas, he fell, right? What if she never went up there? What if he just thought his mom had gone up, came to find her, falls, and she's trying to save him."
Dean's theory rings so true, Sam can picture the same thing happening with himself filling Thomas' role, Dean chasing him and ultimately dying to save him.
"Sounds too normal for you."
"Yeah, well, tell me why the kid would wander out in the middle of a storm."
He doesn't have an answer. Just lets his eyes wander over the ocean where dark clouds are forming far out past where the sailboats will go. Beside him, Dean knocks on the chain-link fence.
"Guess there's a reason this is here."
"And yet we so easily jumped it."
His brother looks around, and Sam's relieved he takes some steps back from the edge. "Man, this place must be a magnet for kids."
"Not all kids are attracted to haunted buildings or creepy areas, Dean. Just you."
"C'mon," Dean smirks. "Tell me you don't like this stuff."
He would, if they weren't standing so close to a cliff.
--
Rain clouded his vision.
The wind howled so loud outside, he couldn't hear anything. Not the TV in the living room, or the horn he knows should be blaring every couple of seconds. Just the pounding of blood in his ears as he ran through the house looking for mom. She wasn't in the kitchen making dinner. Wasn't up in her bedroom. He even checked out in the garage even though only dad went out there.
His breath caught in his throat. Where is she? Why won't she answer when he calls out for her?
He raced around the house, searching everywhere. Flinging open cabinets, pulling things out of closets. She'll be angry with him when he finds her, but that's okay. At least she'll be there, not lost anymore.
A scream echoed through the house.
"Mommy!" he screamed, and pushed through the back door, racing through the yard, past his merry-go-round and swing set, crossing that line dad told him to never cross. He caught a glimpse of his mom's hair near the water, and ran faster.
His foot gets caught on something, and suddenly he's down, the rain so hard, the wind so loud, he can't hear or see anything. Just wants to find his mom.
He scrambled on the ground, trying to pull against what was keeping him back, and finally is able to lean over the edge. There, he found his mom. He screamed for her over and over again, the thing holding him back finally letting him go.
The inertia sent him hurdling over the edge. Falling. Falling. He fell through the blue water, still trying to see his mom. Lungs fill with air. Where was mommy? Isn't she supposed to save him? His arms and legs get heavy. He gasped, without air for so long, he can't help but try and breathe. Gasps and sputters and falls and shouted once more for his mom.
A ball of flames swept him through the water, up into the air --
Sam jolts awake with a start. The quest for a lost mother's all too familiar to him. His lungs burn and he coughs a few times before sucking in deep gulps of air, desperately reminding his body that it wasn't him who was drowning, it wasn't him searching through a foreign house for a mother he didn't know.
The desperation to find her was something he could only vaguely understand. As a child, he remembered running around sometimes, chasing after the tail end of his mother's nightgown as it disappeared around corners and through doors. But as he grew older and saw the raw pain in his father and brother's faces, he stopped. Pretended not to see anything anymore and kept his head down.
Even then, he'd never seen her face.
In this dream, which had him panting in the moist air, the child -- and at this point, he could assume it was Thomas -- knew his mother. Lost her. You can only lose something you knew, and Sam struggles to understand the full range of emotions thrust at him.
"Dude," comes a groggy voice from the darkness to his left. "We need to take you to a psychic doctor or something?"
Sam would groan if he weren't still struggling to breathe. "Why?" he manages to get out between deep breaths.
"'Cause." His brother's answer's simple, but speaks volumes. Because you just started drowning in your sleep because of a dream. "Thomas?"
"Yeah, I think so." Breathing's easier now that his lungs have discovered they're not underwater or under the control of a lost spirit. "He was...looking for his mom, couldn't find her."
"I figured," Dean says. The mattress squeaks and suddenly Dean's voice is much louder. "You kept shouting 'Mommy.'"
There a huge amount of gravity in that voice, enough to weigh them both down a little more than normal. The room shifts in a stripe of color as the lights from a car flicker through the window, gone as quickly as they appeared. In that single moment, Sam catches a glimpse of Dean's face; sharp and angular in the harsh misshapen light, wearing an expression he hasn't seen in years.
Like every expression covered in mothballs Dean drags up from time to time, it, too, disappears as quickly as the light.
"Yeah. Sorry."
"Not a problem," -- there's another squeak and a shifting of blankets as Dean gets comfortable again -- "just get back to sleep."
No jokes, no snide remarks. Just a kind suggestion, get some sleep. Sam's used to more, used to longer conversations on the wrong side of midnight, the kind that lull him back to sleep with their simple reassurance.
He lets the silence slide, finds a bit of comfort in the darkness, and falls onto his back. The ceiling here isn't the same as their used to; instead of cheap industrial tiling or yellowed paint, the sky above is pure white, a ceiling fan stuck in the middle. It turns, the blades catching whatever shadow they can as they whirl around, and if he tries hard, he can trace a single blade around for one revolution before being caught up in the bigger picture again.
Sam sighs and puts a hand behind his head.
"What?" Dean asks, his voice muffled by a layer of blankets.
"When I was a kid, did I..."
"Oh, God," his brother remarks. "Were you watching Oprah while I was getting ready this morning?"
"Weren't you the one that cited her once?"
Dean groans and turns over. "Okay. But we're never speaking of that again."
"I was just thinking. When I was a kid, did I, did I say I saw mom?"
Gravity returns. He feels as if he's going to sink through the mattress and box spring, past the floor, though the ground, to the center of the earth.
Dean clears his throat, buying time, Sam thinks, to think up a good cover. But his brother surprises him by sitting up, his feet thunking to that floor Sam's going to sink right through.
"Yeah. You did."
All that frustration and hurt radiating from Dean after visiting Lawrence -- the only real home he'd ever have -- suddenly makes sense, and maybe the molten lava core of the earth isn't Sam's final destination.
She'd come for him, not Dean, not the son she'd seen grow up a little. The one she'd really known. Instead, she came for the one she knew would see her, listen to her even if her message carried no words, only emotions. She came to Sam, played with him when no one thought that possible, gave him a bit of normality when life was beginning to spiral into the realm he lives in now.
Logic would tell him it wasn't his fault, that he has no control over other people, especially spirits; he knows this from experience. Yet he finds a piece of him feels bad, feels sorry for his brother, his normal-yet-abnormal brother who's only outstanding gift is his ability to survive.
And when they were younger, didn't Sam tease Dean about his unrelenting dedication to the hunt?
My, how the tables have turned.
"Dean, I'm so -- "
"Hey, don't. We don't need to have a talk about this shit, okay? We're not at a sleepover, I haven't painted your toenails, and we are defiantly not talking about all that girly stuff like relationships and feelings." Dean takes a moment. That one was waiting for awhile; Sam can tell when he's rehearsed his deflections. "But if you'd like, my toenails could use a little attention."
"Wow. Thanks for that visual."
"What can I say? I have a gift for language."
There's no reason to ask do you think I really did because if visiting their house proved anything, it was the hard reality of Mary's spirit.
"Dean," he starts, unsure if he's gone back to sleep, or at least attempted to do so. "If Thomas was looking so hard for his mom, where was his dad during all this?" Because if there's one thing he does understand with amazing clarity, it's the love and protection only a father can give.
--
"Damnit."
Dean looks up from his bed, tearing his eyes away from channel surfing for just a moment to eye his brother on the other bed, face hidden by the laptop screen. The TV settles on a station and soft jazz fills the room -- the trademark of the Weather Channel -- like a cheesy soundtrack to their lives.
"What?" he asks, arm still raised with the remote pointed at the television.
Sam blows off a bit of steam that ruffles his bangs. "William Chillins died four years ago." There's frustrated silence while Sam closes the laptop and tosses it a little roughly onto the bed beside him. "We can't talk to him, and I doubt anyone else is going to know where he was."
"People talk," Dean shrugs. "I mean, if I ditched my family and they died, I'm sure the townspeople would, you know, come to my door. Or at least look at me funny."
"They already look at you funny," Sam says. Dean gives a wide grin, but doesn't exactly forget how so alike to their own situation this whole thing's turning out to be.
"'Cause I'm a mystery. I'm mysterious."
"And what am I? An open book?"
"A lost puppy."
Sam tosses a pillow at Dean, who dodges to the left and lets it sail past him to hit the wall. He turns to look at his brother quizzically; a pillow?
"Whatever," Sam says in reply to the unvoiced question.
Dean shakes his head. "So, we've got a kid who's haunting you, which is kinda funny in that bad-horror-movie kind of way -- "
"Geeze, Dean, thanks."
"-- who died because his mom went out in the storm. We say, why go out? And her husband's nowhere around, which is pretty normal, except for there was this huge storm."
"Well, I checked that. The Coast Guard keeps records of all incidents. Seems this wasn't the first time something like this has happened up there."
This is good news, or at least news in the right direction. "Oh?"
"Yeah. Four times, over the past 150 years."
"That's not exactly a surprising number there, Sam."
"Get this," Sam continues. He's got the laptop open again, and crosses the gap between them to sit on the edge of Dean's bed. "First, in 1858. The light went out in a huge storm and the keeper was nowhere to be found. Then again in 1887, 1903, and last in 1965. The weird thing? The last three swear the light went out, but no one noticed a thing. Coast Guard even checked the tower and switched out the light."
"And let me guess. Nothing was wrong with it," Dean deadpans.
"Exactly. And all four time, the keeper's nowhere around. No one knows where they were. All four died sometime after. Dean, I think there's something up there doing this."
It's a good line of reasoning. Dean looks over the information himself, skimming the Coast Guard records Sam found somehow.
"There aren't many people who live up there, though. Can't have that many witnesses who look at the light every night," he remarks offhand, trying to read between the black and white lines on the screen. There's something there, he just can't see it, which frustrates the hell out of him.
"True." Sam thinks for a second. "What about the storm?"
"Huh?"
Dean looks up when Sam doesn't answer, and sees he's watching the TV still playing the weather channel. The local forecast has come on; a huge blob of dark green with lighter green sprinkles is poised over Massachusetts with a threatening growl heard faintly outside.
"We better figure this out fast, because I have a feeling this storm has more to do with it than we think."