Snapping the phone shut on the terrifying image, Dean hurled it across the room. It crashed with the far wall and bounced and hit the ground. Behind him, Sam stirred.
He frantically looked to the clock. 3:07. Where the hell were they going to find a place to copy a tape in the next five minutes? And at this hour of the morning! He looked at the TV, then at Sam, and scrambled out of his bed and practically pounced on the man.
"Woah, Dean!" Sam immediately gasped, suddenly awake and wriggling to get away, "What the hell are you doing?"
"Sam, we've got to get out of here..." Dean said quickly, ripping the blanket off to reveal that Sam was only wearing a sweater and boxers, "You're still cursed..."
"What? Dean, what're you talking about, I thought we-..." he trailed off, then stopped, and looked down at his arm, slowly rolling up his sleeve. The hand-print burn scar was still there... "No..." he breathed.
"Come on!" Dean yelled. He grabbed his brother by the wrist and wrenched him out of bed. "Get the tape and we're out of here."
"Where are we going to go?" Sam asked meekly, snagging the tape off the nightstand and hooking it under his arm as he was pulled along. His eyes darted to the television set, which was for some reason collecting condensation all around the edge. "What are we going to do?"
"We're going to get you as far the hell away from any televisions and phones as is humanly possible..." Dean began, "...then bust into a Radioshack and copy this thing for you." He looked at Sam nervously, as the man followed along, a look of loss and hopelessness on his face. "You're gonna be okay." he assured himself for than he did his brother.
Sam just gave a silent nod.
The elevator moved excruciatingly slowly for Dean's taste. He looked at his watch constantly as the seconds ticked by. Halfway to the bottom Sam began hyperventilating. Dean looked over in worry, and opened his mouth to ask 'are you okay', when the lights began flickering in the little chamber.
He look wildly up, God no, not here... he thought. Oh, he hated elevators... no way to escape. Still though, it kept moving on it's descent down, down, down... the numbers lighting up in correspondence to the floor they were on.
Yet as they went lower and lower, the carpeted floor beneath them began to get soggy and wet... water rose and bubbled up inside it.
"No!" Dean screamed at it, as Sam backed himself into a corner. The elder looked down at his watch. 3:10. "It's not time yet!" he tried to reason with the water. A loud ding pierced the damp air in the small room, heralding their arrival to the floor of the lobby. The water sank away just as the door opened, leaving the two brothers to run out with wet ankles and shoes and seemingly no reason for it... well, Dean with wet shoes, Sam just barefoot in boxers, thus granting them strange looks from the few still about at this time of the night, as they ran out the door.
Tumbling into the car, Dean took off while Sam was still diving in and closing the door behind him. "Two minutes, man." Dean's voice was shaky and panicked as he drove down the empty streets at tire-shredding speeds. "Two fucking minutes!"
"What are we going to do?" Sam said weakly, "Burning the body... should've stopped the curse..." he murmured.
"Yeah, well it didn't." Dean frowned, turning down another street. God, there had to be a decent electronics' store somewhere in this damned city. "So now Rachael tells me we've got to copy this tape to stop you from dying."
"You talked to Rachael?" he breathed questioningly, staring at Dean in the darkness. The man was silent.
"WATCH OUT!" Sam yelled as they took a turn around a corner. He pointed wildly out the windshield, gripping the armrest of his seat so that his knuckles turned white.
Dean slammed the breaks, but Sam only yelled again. "No, No! DON'T STOP!"
Standing in the road facing them was the dreaded little girl. The street was flooded, water spilling out in all directions like a river from her feet. She looked up from beyond her dark hair, cascading over her shoulders, and held an arm outstretched, unmoving as the car skidded towards her... and passed straight through.
The image fizzled like the static on a television. And Dean, after proclaiming a very loud, "Holy Shit!" and hit the gas to the floor again, tearing off down the street. In the mirror he saw the girl, apparently also a little confused, slowly look up and turn around to face them again.
The streetlights streaming down spotlighted her, and bathed her in their warm golden light to her cold grey-blue, as her entire form seemed to glow brighter and brighter, an almost angelic figure in the dark... she could have easily been mistaken for one such an innocent if it were not that Sam and Dean knew exactly what she was capable of...
The glow disappeared in a flash and crack like lightning, and so did she. Dean turned his eyes definitively back on the road ahead of him. He heaved a relieved sigh, "Oh thank god, there's one right there..." the car was brought to a screeching halt before the glass display window of a store on the side of the street. He turned to Sam and ordered, "Get the crowbar under the backseat."
Straining against inertia of the car stopping forcing him forward, Sam struggled backward to reach behind and grab the item.
Dean cocked his gun, and forced open the door quickly, hopping out and running around to wrench the passenger's side open as well. Sam slid out, and handed his brother the crowbar, which was swiftly put to use in breaking open the door of the shop. Shards of glass were sent glittering into the street, and by some miracle, an alarm didn't sound. With the small flashlight on his keychain, Dean dragged his brother in and began staring around for the desired piece of equipment. A tapedeck. A nagging darkness in the back of his mind warned that they might not be able to find it, they were ancient, after all, now that there were DVDs, and DVD burners, but if any place had it... this would be the one.
"Got one!" Sam cried. Dean hadn't noticed he'd left his side, and ran over with the flashlight.
"What're you waiting for?" he demanded, "Put it in!"
"I need something to copy it to!" Sam said frantically, glancing up at his brother from where he'd knelt by the device.
"Fuck!" Dean looked around, his light falling upon a stack of blanks on a shelf in the back. He ran for them, slipping slightly on the slick floor. Wow... it was tile, but it shouldn't be that hard to walk straight on... he looked down at it. Shit, water...
"Dean!" came a wavering call from his brother.
"What is it?" he asked, reaching up for one of the blank tapes stacked on the shelves, not even bothering to look away from his current task.
"You'd better hurry!"
Turning around, he saw the room lit with an eerie green-grey light. Every single television set was showing the same image. A clearing in the forest, scraggly trees behind, tall, thin, and bare. An all-too-familiar well lay open in the center of it.
"Catch!" the tape was thrown to him, and Sam quickly stuffed it into the second slot on the recorder, fumbling with the buttons to try and get them both to do the right thing...
"Hurry it up!" Dean ordered, standing protectively at his brother's back, after having scrambled over to him, "She's coming!"
Sure enough. A good two dozen screens displayed the same terrible image. The girl pulling herself up from the depths of the well, finding her footing on the ground, and staggering slowly forwards... slowly, slowly, slowly... then a flash, and she was closer...
"Come on, Sammy! Make that damn thing go faster!" Dean held his gun out. At this rate, they were going to be surrounded and assaulted by not one creepy little girl, but at least twenty.
"I can't! It's got to go all the way through at the same speed it takes the original to play..."
BLAM. A shot rang out, and a shatter. One television spilled it's glass and electronic insides all over the floor.
BLAM. "Yeah, well I'm buying you as much time as I can..." Dean glanced back at him, then shot at another set. BLAM. Crash, glass spilled all over the floor, and the image faded. Then, with a rushing torrent, water spilled out of the broken screen, crashing in a white spray on the ground below.
Damnit... Dean bitterly thought as he lowered the gun to another screen, and the wave from the water sloshed against his calves, ...after we get out of this, I'm going to be afraid to shower for the next month because of all the water...
Sam remained crouched before the recording tape, ignoring the madness around him, as Dean backed farther and farther into him, fearfully staring down the nearing images of Samara... as one of them, the one just ahead of them both, at last finished its approach to the screen. A hand reached out, pressed against the glass, then passed through, straining against the threshold.
"Holy Shit!" Dean called out again. All the other images flickered, and faded, as this one pulled itself out of the screen, all the while an unignorable buzzing burning in his ears.
Sam groaned behind him, hands clasped around his head, fingers lacing through and pulling roughly at his hair as the tape he was recording mimicked the sound of Samara's escape, making it doubly loud and painful.
BLAM. A bullet whizzed out of the barrel of his gun, impacting on the screen, and it blackened as the glass flew through the image of the girl still struggling her way out of it... though this only appeared to make it easier for her. With a wet flop she fell onto the floor amidst the flood of water.
"Where are we at Sammy?" his voice shook as he dropped his now useless gun, and pulled out the other one, loaded with rocksalt.
"Almost..." he choked, "...almost done..."
Dean chanced a glance at his brother, crouched and doubled over on the floor, his eyes still straining upwards to the tape as it counted down the last few numbers. Looking back, the raven-haired spectre had closed the distance between them in mere seconds, and he gasped, instinctively raising the gun and firing.
White salt crystals sprayed through the air, doing no more than making ripples on the illuminated surface of her body. Silently, she tilted her chin up, and the hair fell away from her face, revealing black lips pulled into an ugly frown. Soulless eyes glared up at the man... Erratic, jerky motions defined her movements as she reached up, taking a stone-cold, and iron-hard grip on his neck. He choked, and gagged for the air. The gun fell from his hand and splashed into the water.
"Dean!" he faintly heard Sam call.
With the unnatural strength that such spirits often had, Samara threw him aside, sending him skidding across the flooded floor. "No...!" he spluttered, after his body's path was blocked, and his movement broken by a tall shelf with yet more televisions on it. "Sam!"
He turned wildly, and looked up into the eyes of the little girl that loomed over him, kneeling. Amidst the swallowing shadows, she glowed with her own light, while a thin arm reached for his neck, too. The man's face paled several shades as he pushed himself away from her, squeezing his entire body up against the shelf that the tape recorder was doing its work on.
"SAM, NO!" came another frantic call from Dean, across the room, as he coughed, choking and drowning on the water he'd inhaled, while all the while still trying to force his body to move.
As bony fingers closed and tightened around Sam's hot skin, the man's eyes closed tight, tears streaming from them as he fought for breath. And the tape behind him buzzed in completion. His eyes snapped open, and hazily wandered over to the device, as the flap over the rectangular slot opened up, and the tape was spat out.
Yes! Sam thought, a shining bolt of hope dazzling through his mind... or maybe it was lack of oxygen. Feebly, as the girl was forcing him slowly to the ground with her alarming strength, an arm reached up for it, flailed slightly, missing several times... "Ugh..." he grunted, at last feeling his fingers brush against the warm plastic, still heated from being used inside the machine... but all his strength had left him, and he could not even close his grip around it to pull it out.
His arm splashed into the water beside him, and his vision faded to blacks and whites, blurred even.
At last, a yell broke through the oncoming silence, and the scrape of plastic on plastic as Dean pulled out the tape, and slipped it into his vision, barring the view between Samara's eyes and his own.
"He's got it!" the man yelled, "He's got it! He's copied the damn tape, now get the hell away!" He would've shot her, but for the effect it had last time it would've only hit Sam.
The girl paused, not yet relinquishing her grip, and turned her gaze just slightly away, seemingly taking in the sight of the tape, before her head whipped around, and she gave a gurgling hiss, water boiling and bubbling inside her decayed mouth, as one hand let go, and swung around to hit Dean yet again, once more sending him sliding away across the ground.
No... Sam dizzily tried to focus on the thing that was killing him as it bore down. No... why...? We did everything right... why... maybe they'd copied it too late. Maybe burning her body only made her more pissed off...
In the eternity it seemed to take for him to slip away into death, some things began to make sense. Burning the body didn't dispell the spirit, copying the tape didn't either, but saved the copier from death. So what did that do? At last, he understood.
Normally for spirits, no body, no survival. Samara was different. Her existence, her very consciousness was connected to these tapes as a result of her strange power, nensha. You couldn't just burn her bones and be done with it, you had to destroy each and every single thing her will was connected to. Each new copy of the tape that someone makes adds to willpower, and essentially makes her stronger...
...and not only that. Each new tape was another chance for her to spread her word, and her story, and her will and her mission. And her mission? To take over those people who possessed the same powers that she did when she was alive. People like Sam.
But why me? he slowly thought, Why do I have this damned power anyway? All it does is give me trouble, damnit, why!
In his unconsciousness, he heard the spine-tingling familiar voice of Samara speaking out to him, "Where's mommy?" she called, a strange, childlike gentleness to her usually throaty growl.
Then it all hit him. What was the single defining moment that had turned around the entire course of his life even after it had only just begun? How had his family been thrown along down the road to hunting? And who had been the one person that could've changed all that? And why hadn't she?
"My mom..." he breathed weakly to the girl, "...is dead."
A pause. The tightening pressure around his neck diminished. From the blinding whiteness and blackness that had flashed through his vision all at once, an image cleared... He was lying flat out on the ground, his face just barely above the water, so that he could see the little spirit straddling his chest, and looking off to one side at the two, yes two plain black tapes floating in the water there.
Slowly, she stood up, and moved off to one side of him, her gaze still peering down at the tapes. At last, she turned once more to Sam, watching him through her tunnel of hair.
"I wanted..." she said softly, as a single tear glinted down her pallid cheek, "...my mommy."
With a crackle, she was gone. The TVs still intact flashed bright, then went dim, and all the water sunk away.
Sam fell back, completely spent. His eyes closed, and he missed the completely blank, confused expression on Dean's face as the older man sat up, and took the whole scene in.
"Sam!" he finally called out, dragging himself over, for now ignoring his own obliviousness in favor of finding out if his brother was allright. "Sam, what the hell happened?" he asked breathlessly, looking down at him.
Sleep was coming on fast for the exhausted man, and as he exerted a final effort, and cracked his eyelids open one more time to look at Dean, outlines fuzzy from between his long eyelashes, he only smiled, and managed to say: "I didn't have what she really wanted."
---
Author's Ending Note Thingy: I am SO happy with this chapter. As always, however, I don't think it's creepy enough... but no matter, everything came together just as planned in the end.
If you're confused, and are also true ring fans, you will remember that in the second movie, the only reason Samara wanted Aiden was because, not only did he (like Sam) have the special powers that made him a weakness for spirits to slip into, but Rachael was his mother, and a very good mother to him. Everyone agrees that Mary (had she lived) would've probably been a good mother, right? Right? Yeah. But since they'd already gotten entwined with the demon of the canon Supernatural series, that foiled all of Samara's plans...
In The Ring Two, though Aiden had copied the tape already in the original The Ring, Samara continued her pursuit of him so that she could be with his mother. Just like here, Sam had finished copying the tape before she'd actually attacked him, but she disregarded this in order to take over his body. However, gave up at last when she realized he didn't have the mother she wanted.
Hang in there guys, there's oooone last chapter coming!
