Disclaimer, Summary, Rating: See Chapter 1.
THE SCENT OF YOU
Chapter 15
Dean reflexively hit the brake pedal and laid a layer of rubber across Highway 136, narrowly missing the MASTERSON sign pole as he brought the Impala to a precipitous halt in what he managed to make a controlled skid – before turning a wrathful face to his younger brother. It was damn lucky the time was way too early for other cars to be about or inconvenient traffic cops to have seen that little manoeuvre. Sam knew better than to pull stunts like this!
Sam was oblivious to his ire, "Reverse back, quick; to that church!"
Swallowing several choice words, Dean reversed the Impala back and pulled into the side until they were out front of an old stone-and-clapboard white church with a sign declaiming: CHRIST THE KING. Sam scrambled out of the Impala followed by Dean.
It was an old but well maintained construction, though of no obvious denomination. Until 1836 'Texias' had been part of Mexico, meaning the church was probably Catholic if it dated back that far. Dropping the 'i' after winning the Texias War of Independence against General Santa Ana, Texas had been an independent nation in its own right, the Republic of Texas, for 10 years until 1845 when Texans had voted to relinquish their national sovereignty and become a State of the American Union. During that period Texas had been largely non-denominational, so the church could equally be Baptist or Presbyterian.
Dean leaned against the hood of the Impala, looking to where Sam had hurried to stand in front of a large church notice-board type sign with glass 'doors' that was advertising some theological seminar or religious conference or something.
There was a mock up of a 'triptych' type display inside the board. On the extreme left was a picture of a red-skinned creature with short horns on its head, the lower body of a satyr and a horned tail, carrying a pitchfork and sporting a goatee and a leering grin. Underneath, someone had printed in large black capital letters: SATAN'S SECOND-FAVOURITE WAY OF HAVING THE WORLD SEE HIM.
In the middle, someone had tacked up just a blank, white sheet of letter-sized paper, underneath which was the caption: SATAN'S FAVOURITE WAY OF HAVING THE WORLD SEE HIM.
On the far right picture someone had morphed the head of a handsome heartthrob type onto the body of a hunky fashion model that looked as if it had been taken straight from the cover of GQ. The model was holding open both hands palm outwards and fluttering down was money, jewellery, houses, cars, and little depictions of swimsuit-edition-pretty men and women in tight trunks and tiny bikinis. At the bottom of the picture were a crowd of people eagerly reaching up their hands to catch the goodies, oblivious to the small snakes and red-orange flames depicted around the edge of the picture. The caption read: WHAT SATAN REALLY LOOKS LIKE, and underneath quoted: '2nd Corinthians 11:14 & 15, 'And SATAN…transforms himself into an 'Angel of Light'. It is therefore nothing great if his ministers ALSO keep transforming themselves into ministers of 'righteousness'…BUT their END shall be according to their WORKS!'
Sam was practically pressing his nose to the glass. "That's it…"
"Oh not again….Why can't I have an epiphany for a change?" Dean grumbled rhetorically.
Sam whirled around to face him, his face alight with what Dean privately termed the 'Geek Glow', that radiant joy of suddenly knowing you know the answer.
"Don't you see?" He burbled. "We know what's out there, Dad, you, me, Caleb and Jefferson and all the Hunters all over the world…and we fight it and kill it…but the people we fight for mostly laugh at us, and ridicule us; half of them want us locked up in mental institutions!"
"Not saying anything I don't already know, Sammy."
"Dean, think! What would happen if suddenly, today, it was on the news that the existence of supernatural stuff was right and that it was true? What do you think would happen if our Dad was suddenly proved not be a crazy vagrant with too great a fondness for tequila but a national hero?" Sam insisted.
"We could actually get dental?"
Sam grinned at him, "We could get anything, Dean. The world would be at our feet. The President would pin so many medals to his chest that Dad would collapse under the weight."
"Fun fantasy; but it's never going to happen." Dean pointed out.
"Ah-ah!" Sam waggled his finger, "It was never in any danger of happening, because of what we have to do when we Hunt. We kill evil things, Dean, but that's not enough; to stop them altogether, we have to destroy them – we cover them with the salt of Mother Earth and purify them with fire and if it's a real badass evil, we cleanse the spot with Holy Water."
"Again, I get this feeling of déjà vu as if I know all this from somewhere…wait, I do," Dean retorted, "I was the one who taught you all this."
Sam growled in frustration at his brother's obtuseness. Dean was one of the brightest people Sam knew – his IQ may have even been able to give Sam a run for his money – but Dean was intellectually lazy, preferring to have others do the mental gymnastics and then give him the Cliff Notes.
"We eradicate the abomination from the face of the Earth, and that's our biggest problem," Sam emphasised, "because the only way to destroy the evil is also to destroy all the evidence of it. We say the little smoking pile of ash was a skanky demon-fiend, when it could just be a log of wood and we have no proof because salt, fire and water are the three most destructive things you can use on DNA. But think, Dean," he pointed at the blank sheet of paper, "think what would happen if we could prove these things exist. Empirically measured, scientifically studied, quantified, analyzed, tagged and numbered."
Dean straightened up slowly from the Impala as cogs began to turn. Wait a minute… "It would be bad for evil business."
"Understatement, brother mine," Sam growled. "Every thief's fantasy is to be the Invisible Man, and Evil has managed it…that's how something as terrible as Meg Master's bestial Zoroastrian demons could roam this world for millennia and yet nobody could ever definitively prove they were real."
Dean watched as Sam began to pace, almost babbling in excitement, unwittingly betraying his own 'I'm-just-the-muscle' façade as nonsense as he had no problem keeping up with Sam's rapid-fire delivery.
"One of the hardest things for our kind to accept with what we do is that we can't save everyone. We can't be in every State of the Union, every city of the world, when some dumb kids in Oslo, Norway start fooling around with an Ouija Board because they know it's all a crock, or some stupid teenager in Edinburgh, Scotland stands in front of a mirror and summons Mary or the Hookman because they know it isn't real." Sam ranted. "It is so hard to accept that…that…"
"Sometimes no matter how quickly you run, you'll never be fast enough; sometimes no matter how tightly you hold on, you'll never be strong enough," Dean supplied quietly for him…it was a familiar nightmare, almost a friend from his fifth year of life, his ever present terror that one day the person who would be fatally failed by his failure to be fast enough and strong enough would be Sammy.
"Even though we fight so much…I see what it does to Dad, what it does to you…it's a cold comfort to know that we've prevented more deaths when so many have been killed…Dad will be beating himself up forever that he never put together those disappearances in Burkitsville years ago…" Sam said earnestly, "…and the world today just makes it harder than ever, because the world around us is all about moral relativism; 'do your own thing and be happy' Lori Stevenson said, but that's a bankrupt philosophy, because what happens when that hurts other people? What about the cuckolded husband of Reverend Sorenson's mistress? Or their children? Or Lori? Where does that leave them?"
Dean didn't answer, recognising the rhetorical questions as Sam's busy brain 'thinking aloud'.
"People today don't believe there's an upstairs, never mind that there's anyone there. So like gullible animals who keep taking the bait they're picked off, surrounded by invisible thieves who plunder at their leisure. But we're one-eyed men in the land of the blind. We know what's out there; we know that not only is there an upstairs and someone's there, we know…."
"There's also a basement with a bogeyman," Dean finished.
"And what would happen if that became known? If it was proved; if all the invisible thieves suddenly found they'd lost their powers and were walking around in orange jumpsuits like a sore thumb?"
"Evil would lose its power base," Dean admitted.
"Oh, way beyond that…Evil would be ended…" Sam shook his head at the awesome magnitude of the concept. "Think about it…we're laughed at, ridiculed, scorned. We have psychobabblers trying to institutionalise us, religious crackpots trying to either canonise us or demonise us, and law enforcement types trying to pin everything back to Jack the Ripper on us and throw away the key. But most of the time it's not that people don't believe us, it's that they don't want to believe us."
"A man convinced against his Will, Is of the same opinion still." Dean quoted Alexander Pope quietly.
Sam pushed back his fringe wearily. "Damn right, bro', because belief places you under a moral obligation to act. You're the only guy in your town with a working TV so when the hurricane warning comes you can cower in the cellar with your family and be safe, but you're still as guilty of killing your neighbours as if you'd burst through the door with an AK47; having the only working TV placed you under a moral obligation to act to help them."
"Most people don't want to leave their comfort zone; accepting means you have to deal." Dean shrugged with the blasé resignation of someone who has encountered the tendency practically on a daily basis, and he had to admit he'd known Cassie had fallen into that category from the start; he just hadn't wanted to see it. "So most people rationalise for all they're worth, helped by the fact that even the world's most convincing liar will never be as good at lying to others as he is at lying to himself."
"Even Becky Warren was like that," Sam acknowledged. "She saw the shifter become her so it could capture me, she saw you shoot 'you', but when I hugged her goodbye I could see in her eyes that she didn't really accept it. She said that her and Zack and my college buddies missed me at college, but what she really meant was she wanted me to go back to Stanford instead of carrying on travelling with you because that way she could pretend Jess had really died in a freak accident from faulty wiring and she could dismiss the whole shape-shifter thing as a stress-induced hallucination."
"Yeah, I got that…" Dean had never been as eager to get away from a place – not even the Bender family's fun home-town, as he had been to leave Rebecca Warren in a cloud of Impala dust. The entire time they'd been in that town he'd swung between jealousy over being constantly confronted by examples of the great time Sam had had at college and fear that Sam would acquiesce to her not-as-subtle-as-she-imagined manipulation to jettison the road-trip with his whacked-out brother and scurry back to normalcy and her 'my parents live in Paris half the year' lifestyle.
"But if the evil elephant in the corner was scientifically proven to be there and really shitting on your priceless Aubusson carpet," Sam whispered, "then it would be a whole different ball game. Every church, chapel, mosque, synagogue, temple and square inch of hallowed ground would be standing-room only not just on the Sabbath but eight days a week…"
"And it wouldn't matter that the Devil always offers you hot cherry pie and fresh cream instead of cold cabbage," Dean contemplated the fantasy of global piety before his mind's eye. "Right now people have only got the word of Hunters like us to go on when we warn them the goodies are poisoned, but if we had a demon's scaly ass as Exhibit A then Evil would be over and done, because not even the most arrogant, pig-headed and stupid human would wolf down the bowl of pie and cream after 'standing there and watching with their own eyes while the dude poured the bottle of strychnine into the dish' as it were."
"For some reason the demon wasn't around when someone found the Satanic football," Sam stated as they got back in the Impala and set off again down 136 into Amarillo with Dean's foot heavy on the gas, "and the discovery was a disaster for it, because it knew that it wouldn't take long before someone realised that the 'interesting curiosity' was actually a Capital-M Mystery of the kind that leads to sentences like, "'The Nobel Prize…'""
"And since a demon's first solution always involves a body count…" Dean took up grimly, "it simply decided to wipe out those who had come close to figuring out what the find really was."
Sam nodded, "Yep, and at the same time making sure nobody else started investigating. Even the best college is still a business. The demon kills Yolande Godfrey and the college publishes her eulogy on the same day it divides up her workload between her colleagues, but even the best administrative system can only carry on so far if the works are suddenly clogged up with several people becoming unavailable at the same time –"
"Like being suddenly and inconveniently dead," Dean muttered.
"- so by the time it got to Victim No. 3, nobody's work is being re-distributed and nobody is the slightest bit interested in that funny rock for a while."
"Just like a magic show," murmured Dean as he headed down Fritch Highway. "Everyone's watching the magician like a hawk until the voluptuous and scantily-clad assistant parades out bedecked in feathers and sequins – after that nobody's paying attention to the dude in the dull suit when they can get a load of that cleavage."
"Right, and what would you bet that after all the fuss had died down and the unsolved cases had become just another urban legend, that the funny rock and all data pertaining to it had somehow got misplaced?"
Dean snorted, "It's not a bet if it's a sure thing, and that would be on a par with the sun rising in the East tomorrow."
"Uh-huh," Sam concurred. "Colleges accumulate endowments and curiosities and bric-a-brac like dust bunnies under a bed; at some point someone might say, "'Hey, didn't Yolande have some mysterious rock around here somewhere?'" before forgetting all about it and that would be that. We have to destroy the Satanic football and find the discovery site before more people stumble across it and get killed because of what they might figure out."
Continued in Chapter 16…
© 2006, Catherine D. Stewart